Alvaro Jaramillo writes:
> an acceptable activity! Some biologists were concerned that forced
> copulations in animals and rape in humans were not the same things. Male
> Mallards force copulate to increase their chance of fathering more
> Mallards, is this why men do it? ...


> Should make some interesting reading. Sorry Serge, I know you were just
> asking a simple question about duck behaviour. Well, maybe now that you
> know the real story you will boycott the local duck pond and turn your
> attention to some decent birds like gulls, or dare I say it
> blackbirds! ;-)

All this reminds me of a very interesting article in the April'95 issue
of Natural History, "Backyard Battles of Sex" by Nicholas B. Davies.
In this article, he describes the highly complicated sexual behavior of
the Dunnock _Prunella modularis_ (apparently now called Hedge Accentor
in the Sibley/Monroe list of Birds of the World):
Some males manage to copulate with more than one female, some females
manage to copulate with more than one male, sometimes many males have
to share many females (or the other around, if I want to stay politically
correct), sometimes a single male copulates with a single female. The
funny thing is that females encourage other males to copulate with her,
even when they already "have" a male, and males try to keep away the
other males.
The evolutionary interpretation of all this is that males and females
try to maximize their reproductive success: obviously, if a male mates
with many females, chances are that he will have more offsprings in the
next generation. On the other hand, females try to mate with many
(usually two) males, for them to share the bruden of taking care of
her brood, thus maximizing the number of her offsprings.

Of course, all this is a little confused in my head (I'm not a professional
biologist/ornithologist/behaviorist/evolutionist), but I strongly recommend
everybody's reading this article.

Below is the first paragraph:

|"Unobtrusive, quiet and retiring, without being shy, humble and homely
|in its deportment and habits, sober and unpretending in its dress while
|still neat and graceful, the dunnock exhibits a pattern which many of a
|higher grade might imitate, with advantage to themselves and benefit to
|others through an improved example". So wrote the Reverend F.O. Morris
|in _A History of British Birds_ (1856), urging his parishioners to
|emulate the life of the hedge sparrow, or dunnock.

And part of the last paragraph reads:

|...The reverend Morris might have been amused to see that conflicts of
|interest and imperfections, which no doubt occurred among his
|parishioners, also dominated the lives of these little brown birds.


The most astounding thing, in my opinion, is that such behaviors have
only been known for a few decades now, while the Dunnock is a *very*
common bird in Europe.


So many "immoral" things happening in our backyards (and even in
monasteries...) without us even knowing it!


> BTW, while I was writing this (just ten minutes ago), the weirdest sparrow
> popped up at my feeder.
>
> I will report back if I see it againg. If I can confirm this, it will
> certainly be the rarest bird I have seen in my backyard. However, I doubt
> that any birders will come to see it - an unfortunate fact.

Just waiting for the invitation :-)

--
--------------------------------------------------
Microsoft is not the answer.
Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO!!!!
Serge Le Huitouze Intelligent Software Group
email: serge at cs.sfu.ca School of Computing Science
tel: (604) 291-5423 Simon Fraser University
fax: (604) 291-3045 Burnaby, B.C., V5A 1S6 CANADA
http://www.isg.sfu.ca/~serge/