by Cecil Poole

Here at Passive Complicity HQ we’ve discussed monogamy in a somewhat desultory, and disinterested fashion.  See for example Family Values or perhaps Christianity and Sexual Revolution.  We’ve also looked at Nuclear Families of which Kurt Vonnegut said “A husband, a wife and some kids is not a family.  It’s a terribly vulnerable survival unit.” (From “A Man Without a Country” Kurt Vonnegut 2005).  We’ve argued that First Nation Hospitality shows how embracing broader cultures with strong extended families can be, with examples from North America and from Australia.

Many people have used nature to support their view that monogamy is the natural state in the animal kingdom.  This has been the case with song birds in Europe and in North America which Tim Lowe suggests are ‘comparatively conservative’.  ‘The male uses spring song to stake his claim, then helps his mate rear their brood.  Biologists saw in this the monogamous nuclear family idealised by Western society.  Most of the worlds mammals, by comparison, are promiscuous. (My emphasis)

Filthy big bugger

Lowe then goes on to say there is an alternative: ‘Australia’s birds break every ‘rule’, and in every possible way.  Male Bower birds do nothing to aid the young they sire, instead pouring all their energy into boudoirs kept for sex.  At the other extreme are large miner groups, where many males bring food to one nest.  Fairy wrens are highly promiscuous, males almost never siring the chicks in their own nests, instead inseminating the faithless wives of rivals.  

Filthy little bugger

The highest levels of infidelity ever detected in birds have been in Australian magpies (82 per cent in one population), followed by splendid and superb fairy wrens.’

Co-operative breeding (where three or more birds help with parenting) is rare in Europe and North America – where the greatest number of ornithologists are, yet it is common in Africa and Australia.

Ref. ‘Where Song Began’ Tim Lowe, Penguin Books, Melbourne 2014