Feminist birds

Dimorphism in chimpanzees (both pan paniscus and pan troglodytes) is quite pronounced as well. I did postgrad on it.

Shags 😁

Yup, puffins left 3 weeks ago, boo! I did look into going in June / July, but work and poor weather didn't allow.

We saw two seal pups, thousands of shags, (90,000 resident, apparently) gannets, guillemots, a few razorbills, some pigeons... and a 14 foot basking shark - the skipper said its the first he's seen for 12 years!

I'm not very good at bird identification but that is one funny looking pig/sow.

I've read that the male lion's mane, and the male human's facial hair, are both adaptations that provide some protection in fights with other males (or I suppose attacking a female, if it comes to that). Which is rather a sad comment on what our species has evolved to do.

The sociology aspect is about how the human birdwatchers etc behave re the sex differences in birds.

Don’t most mammals look much the same except the males are bigger?

The lion would disagree.

(Sneaky way to placemark for later, thanks OP)

Difference between sexes is so fascinating. Bit weird to talk about it in the context of human sociology though. We’re not birds.

If we were being observed by a David Attenborough type which sex of human would be considered the more interesting to look at? Without artificial additions we’re all a bit dull. Beige to brown skin, no lovely fur or markings. Maybe a redhead or bright blonde would be an interesting variety. A luxuriant beard?

There are certainly more beautiful mammals on earth. Don’t most mammals look much the same except the males are bigger?

This drives me mad (and your last point is so true). So unless I know the sex (e.g. a blackbird) I default to she.

Yesterday I discovered that female eagle owls are much bigger than males.

I was at a city zoo the other day and this big, beautiful and muddy pig with a row of teats was being called a he.

I’m getting better at noticing the sex of birds in species where there is some dimorphism - sometimes obvious, sometimes more subtle. It’s extra pleasing to spot a kingfisher and be able to say ‘he’ or ‘she’.

Related to this is of course the old issue of ‘default male’ … someone seeing an animal and calling it ‘he’, and if you call one ‘she’ you’re likely to be asked ‘how do you know it’s female’ but never the other way round!

This is really interesting. I must admit I've been quite sexist with my bird watching. All the kids picture books about birds feature male birds. And it's got me thinking, because we watch a lot of penguin documentaries. In penguins, the sex roles are slightly different to a lot of other animals. If it was female penguins standing around in Antarctica doing not a lot and holding onto eggs while the male went off hunting, would penguin documentaries still almost exclusively feature egg incubation and long walks to the sea? Or would we suddenly reimagine penguin documentaries with underwater cameras following them around while they hunt underwater (and finally find out how far/where they travel while out hunting)?
Now that I think about it, I'd quite like to see a penguin documentary that focuses on the females, I don't think I've ever seen one.

I think most of them will have gone out to sea by now, breeding season is more may/june/early July isn’t it? Hopefully there will be some interesting wildlife but august tends to be the quiet month.

it occurs to me that apart from feminist considerations, some reading this thread may not have yet come across this fairly new board on MN - a home for the birds, beasts and plant lovers.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/wildlife-nature-conservation

Well, on the subject of birds, we're about to head to Seahouses, for a Farne Island tour. I hope there are plenty of puffins!

I'm very glad that didn’t turn out to be in any culinary sense!

Darwin said that pigeons are the 'greatest treat' that can be offered to a person.

darwin200.christs.cam.ac.uk/pigeons

😍

I'm afraid being lovely and gentle creatures doesn't stop them from being pests!

A woman down the road has two rescued feral pigeons. 3 years ago, my daughter told me about the lady with pigeons in a pram, which wear nappies.

Of course, I assumed she was making it up!

Then we saw her with them, their colours are amazing. Indoors, they follow her round and get on the couch with her. She turns the shower on and calls them, they come up and get under the spray!

Pigeons are lovely and gentle creatures. They're not pests!

Dinosaurs innit

It's very interesting that in birds, males are the homogenetic sex (Zz) while females are heterogenetic (zw) the opposite way around (xx and xy). Birds are so very distant to us genetically.

It leads to some unique situations that couldn't happen in mammals such as the Cuckoos ability to mimic particular bird eggs. There are 'robin' Cuckoos and 'black bird' cuckoos who mimic those eggs, but all while being part of the same species.

Dawkins spoke about it at the beginning of one of his talks, I'll see if I can find it.

Well, I did find this one.

Only some birds (oops, that has an unfortunately familiar sound). There are plenty of birds around where the two sexes are very similar, and I wonder if they're likely to be species where the females and males both take care of the chicks, as opposed to the two of them mating and the male having no further role. So you see families of Canada geese, for instance, and all the adults look pretty much alike. And even though they're pests, pigeons all look the same and the parents work together. There are some birds you can look at and really approve of! On the other hand, mallard ducks do some pretty distressing stuff. So it does seem to vary a lot.