Dunnock Behaviour and Social Evolution
N.B.Davies
This is "The Dunnock Book" often referenced in connection with the unusual sexual behaviour of Dunnocks. I have never seen it in bookstores, but it is easy to get hold of on the internet - when I checked for it at Amazon, they diverted me to a company that prints it on demand, and I got a copy in a week or two.
To paraphrase a summary in the book, Dunnock females compete with each other to carve out territories, and males then compete to monopolise these territories. This can get complicated if one male gains two female territories, or if an alpha and beta male both guard a territory (or two), or so on. It's not complete chaos, though: in return for mating privileges, males help their females to rear their young - which motivates the female to make sure any beta male gets a share of the matings, so as to get help from him as well as the alpha male.
The book not only describes the set up, but shows how the various strategies of the various players work to propagate their genes (or not: since they are not intellectual giants, and don't have access to DNA tests, their strategies aren't perfect). It also describes the experiments and reasoning that led the author to his conclusions, and supports them.
I found it fascinating to see the real facts behind the common knowledge that "Dunnocks have this weird mating behaviour", and interesting to hear how all this was discovered, and how it was checked against evolutionary theory. Towards the end I did become a little bit jaded with the pattern of behaviour description, calculation of what the best strategy would be, and description of studies showing that the bird is following that behaviour, or nearly so, but that says more about my pitiful attention span than about this very good book. And if - like me - you had a thought about human behaviour at the back of your mind - you will be rewarded at the end with a brief comparison, as part of a section on why Dunnock behaviour might or might not be different from that in other species.
N.B.Davies
This is "The Dunnock Book" often referenced in connection with the unusual sexual behaviour of Dunnocks. I have never seen it in bookstores, but it is easy to get hold of on the internet - when I checked for it at Amazon, they diverted me to a company that prints it on demand, and I got a copy in a week or two.
To paraphrase a summary in the book, Dunnock females compete with each other to carve out territories, and males then compete to monopolise these territories. This can get complicated if one male gains two female territories, or if an alpha and beta male both guard a territory (or two), or so on. It's not complete chaos, though: in return for mating privileges, males help their females to rear their young - which motivates the female to make sure any beta male gets a share of the matings, so as to get help from him as well as the alpha male.
The book not only describes the set up, but shows how the various strategies of the various players work to propagate their genes (or not: since they are not intellectual giants, and don't have access to DNA tests, their strategies aren't perfect). It also describes the experiments and reasoning that led the author to his conclusions, and supports them.
I found it fascinating to see the real facts behind the common knowledge that "Dunnocks have this weird mating behaviour", and interesting to hear how all this was discovered, and how it was checked against evolutionary theory. Towards the end I did become a little bit jaded with the pattern of behaviour description, calculation of what the best strategy would be, and description of studies showing that the bird is following that behaviour, or nearly so, but that says more about my pitiful attention span than about this very good book. And if - like me - you had a thought about human behaviour at the back of your mind - you will be rewarded at the end with a brief comparison, as part of a section on why Dunnock behaviour might or might not be different from that in other species.
