What feelings do the first signs of spring inspire in you? Spring for most of us means the end of cold dreary days, the coming of warmth and sunshine, joy, birdsong, pretty flowers blooming, love in the air and so on. I can just picture romantic nature poets like Wordsworth or Shelley sitting under an oak tree, feeling the caress of a gentle breeze and smelling the heady odour of damp earth and pollen. They have captured nature at its best in their poems – its bounty, the playfulness of squirrels and lovebirds. But all that they saw was from a human’s perspective (which is natural of course). And what they and the rest of us fail to appreciate is, what nature as a whole actually sets out to do each spring. Summer is the only time of the year nature has got to propagate itself – to ‘Go forth and multiply’ as is famously preached by the Roman Catholic Church. So what the season really represents is each species’ struggle for survival.
Spring is not the carefree season of joy – for there is no time to waste. Every precious moment under the sun must be spent in searching for food, fighting for mates and nesting sites, feeding the young, protecting them from predators and storing food for the next harsh winter. All the fun and frolic is like the fearful excitement of a war zone: Will I survive to see tomorrow? Will I have the next meal? Will I find a mate in spite of my neighbour being a promiscuous show-off? Will I keep the raccoon from butchering my babies? (Are synonymous with: Will I survive to see tomorrow? Will I have the next meal? Will we lose the war and have our enemies kill our children and rape our women? ... which are quite often the questions that come to a soldier’s mind at wartime.)
One might wonder what prompted me to take such a morbid view of the whole thing. Well it was an article I read, since I am quite fascinated with birds, about the sparrow and the eastern bluebird. It said and I quote:
“Competition for nesting cavities between Eastern Bluebirds (Sialia sialis) and introduced species such as European Starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) and House Sparrows (Passer domesticus) is mentioned often as a cause of the well- documented decline in bluebird numbers in the eastern United States… implicate aggressive competition with House Sparrows as the cause. Besides direct observation, correlational evidence including records of House Sparrow occupation of nesting boxes and incorporation of bluebird bodies into House Sparrow nests associates traumatic death of bluebirds with competition from House Sparrows…that each day visited the bluebird nest and relentlessly pecked at the young bluebirds and any defensive adult till they succumbed to the contusions on the head and/or breast…”
I’m sure you agree with me that it sounds ghastly. I always thought of birds as small, beautiful creatures – at least the insect eating, nectar sucking ones. Not vicious, cruel and territorial beasts! I guess when Herbert Spencer used the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’, he wasn’t kidding! Surviving out there, in the wild, is not a joke; you and I won’t last a day in the jungle.
Apart from food and territory there is the battle for mates. Mallard, one would possibly know, is a beautiful duck; the males have a glossy emerald-green head. But they have strangely aggressive mating habits:
“Mallards have rates of male-male sexual activity that are unusually high for birds. In some cases, as many as 19% of pairs in a Mallard population are male-male homosexual. When they pair off with mating partners, often one or several drakes will end up "left out". This group will sometimes target an isolated female duck — chasing, pestering and pecking at her until she weakens (a phenomenon referred to by researchers as rape flight), at which point each male will take turns copulating with the female. Male Mallards will also occasionally chase other males in the same way. (In one documented case, a male Mallard copulated with another male he was chasing after it had been killed when it flew into a glass window.)”
All of this probably makes me feel extremely glad that I’m human. And I also begin to understand what makes us humans different from other animals. Although there is an amusing movie called ‘The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human’ in which aliens try to comprehend what drives humans to irrational behaviour when in love, I think we’ve achieved through evolution, a much longer reproductive period (not restricted to spring) and the ability to care for and nurture our children, physically, mentally and spiritually.
