You gotta love spring. It was slow in arriving this year, but the signs are now all about us. This is, after all, the time when the fancy of a young man (or insect or bird or bee for that matter) turns to thoughts of making more.
I see birds and insects pairing up and I think of Edward Last-of-the-Hucklings, as a three-year-old. How delighted he would be watching “biwds wessling onda groun.” His mom or I might say “Oh, they are just making more birds.” How he would laugh.
Now, I wander across campus and watch birds, bugs, a couple squirrels or students strutting their stuff for each other. Everywhere is a frenetic desire to make more, and I have to smile.
Research has shown that most reproductive decisions are made by the females of species – as it should be. There is more to that story, and I got in a little trouble writing about it, once.
In the late 1980s, a few months into the Colorado version of this column, I stumbled into a conversation about geese and their mating habits, as compared to men in general, and her man in particular. The angry woman with whom I was suddenly conversing punctuated her conclusion with “Well, at least geese mate for life and know how to be faithful… Put THAT in your male chauvinist pig attitude and smoke it!”
What could I do? It took very little research to discover what waterfowl specialists had found. In any given clutch of four to ten eggs on arctic breeding grounds, there was DNA of at least two ganders – and as many as four. Geese may mate for life, but they fool around.
Mallard duck studies indicate the hens are, also, actively committed to the diverse future of their species. Deer, too: old buddy Bob Hernbrode of the Colorado Division of Wildlife handed me a memo from the research center in Fort Collins noting that a fair percentage of twin deer fawns had two different daddies.
I was duty-bound, of course, to pass on these findings of philandering geese, ducks and deer to my readers. Responses contained suggestions of biased research, and more than one observation about my shortcomings as a writer and male of the species.
Then came that January, 1999, issue of Scientific American. Attached to an article about DNA microsatellites was a sidebar titled “Searching for Papa Chimp.” The three researchers used DNA tracers to probe the mating habits of a group of wild chimps in West Africa. Of 13 offspring, it was shown that seven could not have been fathered by any of the males in the group. Apparently, “at least some of the female chimpanzees must have sneaked into the surrounding forest for trysts with males in other groups. Such adventures might explain how even small groups of chimpanzees maintain a great deal of genetic diversity.”
I love watching the serious-yet-joyful jostling involved in determining whose genes will lead a species into the next generation.
A few years back, I walked out of The Evergreen State College library into a cool brisk sunlit spring day. I was grabbed by drumming from a small grassy edge of Red Square, just beyond one of the construction fences. A young man with a half-dozen hand drums of various types and sizes was deeply into a meditation of rhythm and beat and transcending melody. I leaned on the fence and opened my ears.
In a semi-circle around him were seven or eight young women and one man. At some point, two guys walked up next to me. “That’s all he’s got going for him, man, those drums…” the guy next to me said. Then one of the women walked over, sat down and picked up a drum. As she gently began thumping the drum, eyes closed and swaying with the beat and the drummer, the other guy said, “Well, apparently they’re enough.”
If you have been walking along the river, you’ve been stirred or startled by the noisy early spring pairings of Branta canadensis – our Canada goose. Over the years, I have watched and heard these springtime rituals in Kansas, on the Colorado plains and over mountain lakes high in the Rockies. It is among the most urgent sounds in nature. This spring, their paired-off trips along the river and to and from nearby ponds have been loud and boisterous. One seems always chasing the other, and that piercing “car-uunk, car-uunk, cur-wahnk” is heart-wrenching. I think I have never heard anything more pitiful than the pleadings of a love-struck Canada goose.
Soon, the little California quail boys will be staking out turf on all sides of us. From dawn ‘til dusk, we will hear that passionate “chi-CAH-go, chi-CAH-go.” As the girl quails agree to set up housekeeping in their territories, the boys will use a similar call to warn off intruders.
We humans, and our rituals, are not that unique among the species pairing up around us. As I walk across campus, I watch the strutting and bowing and moves of young men attempting to capture the world on which young women are sitting. Our species will carry forward.
Ah, spring…
