ASI Diary

They aren't us

I own an apartment complex that is totally vacant most of the year, but as Summer approaches it swarms with tenants. That may not sound like a great investment, but listen to this: the occupants take care of renovating and fixing things all by themselves. And they pay their rent daily by allowing me to sit on my steps and watch almost everything they do.

A few years ago there was nothing but empty space where this dwelling now perches. Then a few swallows were seen circling the house, clearly evaluating the site. An ornithologist friend suggested that they were youngsters who couldn’t find suitable lodgings with their flock so they were scouting for building sites, or even better, a fixer-upper. I quickly attached some chicken wire and a small ledge under an eave and the guys saw the advantage. They claimed their spaces and waited for the ladies to arrive and help build nests with little balls of mud that they shape in their mouths.

Swallows typically mate for life, but they do enjoy taking advantage of "other opportunities." When a male spots another guy flirting around his mate he will often try to break it up by giving a predator alarm call. That accounts for some of the noise that I hear around the site.

But here is another interesting item about barn swallow life. In a June 3 Associated Press article journalist Seth Borenstein writes about a study which involved darkening the male’s breast feathers, making them look similar to other more sexually successful males. The results: "A little strategically placed makeup quickly turns the wimpiest of male barn swallows into chick magnets, amping up their testosterone and even trimming their weight," Borenstein reports.

Quoting from Borenstein’s article, "‘It’s the ‘clothes make the man’ idea,’ Safran [Rebecca Safran of the University of Colorado in Boulder] said. ‘It’s like you walk down the street and you’re driving a Rolls Royce and people notice. And your physiology accommodates this.’

"’Before you feel superior to these birds,’ Safran cautioned, ‘people’s mating systems are more similar to birds’ than we might like to admit.’"

And that’s the point. As I watch my swallow tenants go about their lives I think of the ways that their activities mirror human endeavors, or ours mirror theirs. The value of that kind of observation, I suppose, is that people prefer others who are like them, but that is really a human foible and an intellectual dead end street.

So many human-designed studies of other species don’t go beyond comparison, thus they overlook the rich tapestry of uniqueness. These swallows are themselves with their own perceptions and agendas and they strategize their lives in ways that are inimitably theirs. We may never completely understand our fellow earthlings, but if we can appreciate their sometimes imponderable distinctiveness rather than just the parts we can identify with the door to kindness and peace may open a little wider.

Posted on July 02, 2008 at 01:43 pm -- Author's Site

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