This is a follow-up on yesterday's ZGram where I commented on what I thought was just a graphic allegory of a bird at the mercy of the tactics of a foxÑ a silly Aryan bird that did not realize that it had lost the knack for recognizing its own survival threats, i.e., the surreptitious harm inflicted on its young.
It turns out that this is not fiction at all; it's happening to songbirds.
According to an article from the Richmond, Virginia Times-Dispatch, entitled "Songbirds in the Midwest are singing cowbird blues -- Raising orphaned chicks wipes out foster families",
". . . The Midwest has become a disaster area for migrant songbirds and a paradise for a feathered freeloader who tricks other birds into raising its young.
Songbirds . . . are being pushed toward population collapse by cowbirds that lay eggs in other birds' nests and force the hosts to feed and nurture cowbird chicks. . . "
According to this article, a single cowbird female lays eggs in a dozen songbird nests and then leaves them in the songbirds' care.
"These birds don't have an evolutionary history of dealing with cowbirds," a researcher is quoted as saying.
"They haven't learned to recognize that a cowbird egg is not their egg and that cowbird young are not their young."
So we have parasitic cowbirds. These cowbirds hatch earlier, grow faster and push the baby song bird chicks out of their nestÑand most songbirds not any the wiser.
Sounds familiar?
Here it is getting interesting, though, and proves Charles Darwin right.
Some resident birds won't tolerate freeloaders. The Baltimore Oriole, for example, has had it with Affirmative Action. It will puncture a cowbird egg and just throw it out. Robins do likewise. Both robins and orioles are thriving.
So what this means is that some songbird species are learning to assert themselves to their own benefit, increasing their survival chances. To me, this is amazingÑa lesson that should not be left to the birds.
The reader who sent me this article added a few poignant comments:
"Here we have beautiful, brightly colored, noble-looking creatures with sweet poetry and music their art; threatened by . . . parasite birds, whose only distinction is that they can sometimes fool the beautiful ones into thinking that there is no difference between them.
Here we have parasite young crowding out the legitimate young in the nest . . .
Here we have parents spending their precious time and energy feeding and caring for the parasite young.
Its parallel is the vast wealth and even lives which are squandered to "uplift" the forever miserable, here or overseas. . . ."
He is so right. As I was telling a friend a few days ago, when I came to this country with my husband and two babies, freeloading would have been as alien to my nature as the moon is to the sun. We were just kids ourselves. We had no money, no education, no knowledge of English, no car and no friends. We had packed our work ethics, however.
Within three years, we had one of the nicest homes on the block.
My babies are now grown. My younger son, who is a higly competent computer engineer, now married to a woman every bit as competent as he, does not think he can afford a second child because he and his wife have made a choice: She will stay home to raise the one they have. Without a second paycheck, they are now struggling at the margins of existence. They'll never have the kind of home we had - on blue collar wages at that.
There was a time in the mid-Eighties when I did many august interviews of influential people as part of my journalist work for various publications. That's how I met Joe Califano. As many will remember, Califano was the HEW czar of Lyndon Johnson and, later, Jimmy Carter.
As we were spooning our spaghetti, we talked about conspiracies. I was already onto one; and it could make your hair stand up on end. (Since then, I learned of five or six, one even bigger than the otherÑand nothing will surprise me. But then I was grass green and shocked out of my socks. . . )
I put down my fork, leaned forward and said: "Mr. Califano, now tell me to my face: Can something that bizarre be possible?"
There was a pause that seemed to stretch forever. And then the architect who structured our Great Society said in a flat and almost stony voice:
"Only if the government wants it that way."
Ingrid
Thought for the Day:
"Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers. Cannibalism is moral in a cannibal country."
(Samuel Butler)