Dunnocks are rather retiring birds, easy to overlook, as Tony Soper notes: ‘The Dunnock is a shy little bird, a reclusive little bird, that walks around the bottom of the bird table picking up the crumbs. And yet it’s one of these birds that, when you get a really good, close-up look at it, has a really fine plumage, with pinkish legs and a nice little thin bill.’
It was this shyness and modesty that appealed so strongly to the Reverend Morris, as Tim Birkhead points out: ‘Humble in its behaviour, drab and sober in its dress, this was the perfect model for how all his parishioners should behave.’
But then again, the Reverend Morris didn’t know the truth about the Dunnock. As Jeremy Mynott, author of Birdscapes, notes, the sex life of this species is truly extraordinary: ‘It enters into every relationship possible: polygamy, polygyny, polyandry, promiscuity… you name it, the Dunnock does it!’
Sometime during the early part of the year, just as the days begin to lengthen, male Dunnocks leave their hiding places in the shrubbery and are miraculously transformed from shy wall-flowers into loud, self-confident show-offs.
Usually sitting in full view on a hedge, tree or fence post, the male sings his rather flat, tuneless song from dawn to dusk. Like any other songbird at this time of the year, he’s trying to attract a mate. Unlike many other birds, he won’t be content with just one.
Having formed a pair-bond with a female, the male Dunnock spends much of the day following her doggedly around – demonstrating the apparently faithful behaviour that so appealed to Morris. But he’s not doing this out of devotion, but jealousy; because every female Dunnock is keeping half an eye out for a neighbouring male – a rival to her mate. If she can shake off his attentions for a moment or two she will mate with the other male, as Tim Birkhead explains: ‘Dunnocks, instead of breeding as a conventional pair, often breed as a trio: two males paired simultaneously with one female. The female wants both males to mate with her, because if both males mate with her they will both help to rear her chicks.’
Despite her mate’s obsessive guarding, we know that the female Dunnock does often manage to mate with another male. Clutches of Dunnock’s eggs from the same nest have been examined, revealing that the chicks may have several different fathers. The male isn’t always the victim – even while he is devotedly feeding his first brood, he may well sneak off and feed another set of chicks in a nest nearby.
It is thought that this extraordinarily complex breeding strategy evolved because there are normally far fewer female Dunnocks than male ones, which allows them to have the upper hand.
This scandalous behaviour was only revealed in the 1990s, by a group of scientists in Cambridge, led by Professor Nick Davies. It was first shown to a wider public in 1998, in the BBC series The Life of Birds, presented by David Attenborough. Viewers were astonished to see the means by which the first male tries to make sure that his sperm fertilises the female, so that the chicks will be his. As Tim Birkhead points out, his first line of defence is to copulate at an incredible rate – up to one hundred times in a single day. But the male Dunnock has another trick up his sleeve.
Using slow-motion film cameras and a lot of time, skill and patience, wildlife cameraman Barrie Britton eventually managed to capture the split-second moment at which the male – knowing that the female has already mated with his rival – pecks persistently at her cloaca until she expels a packet of sperm from the other male. Only then does the first male actually ‘do the business’. It’s a case of ‘blink and you’ll miss it’, as Tim Birkhead explains: ‘As the droplet of sperm comes out he looks at it, and then copulates with her. The other thing that’s absolutely remarkable is that those copulations in the Dunnock are so fast – it’s about a tenth of a second, which must be almost the fastest bird copulation there is. He basically just flies over her…’
So in choosing the Dunnock as such a fine example of morality and fidelity, the Reverend Francis Orpen Morris could hardly have got it more wrong. As Tony Soper remarks: ‘I’m afraid that the only moral you can draw from them is “every man for himself !”’
Presumably if the Reverend Morris knew what we know today about the Dunnock, he would be turning in his grave.
* * *
Morality was not the only aspect of Victorian culture shaping our fledgling relationship with the birdlife in our towns and gardens. The rapidly growing humane movement also played an important role, by campaigning for compassionate treatment of all God’s creatures. At the centre of this urban mass movement were children’s humane societies, such as the RSPCA’s Band of Mercy, and the Dicky Bird Society, founded in 1876 by W. E. Adams.
William Edwin Adams was a truly extraordinary man. His life story is a classic Victorian tale of endeavour, persistence and sacrifice in the service of others. Born in 1832, in Cheltenham, to poor, working-class parents, Adams became one of the leading social reformers of his day. After leaving school at fourteen, Adams began work as a journeyman printer, and then became a journalist, writing mainly on the burning social issues of his day, and getting involved in the new political movement of socialism.
In 1862, at the age of thirty, Adams had a stroke of luck. Asked to contribute a column to the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, two years later he became its editor, a post he held for more than a third of a century, until he retired in 1900.
By then, Adams had become heavily involved in the movement to educate children in a more humane way, and so he began a newspaper column under the pseudonym ‘Uncle Toby’, dispensing advice to young readers. In 1876, he founded the Dicky Bird Society, aimed at encouraging humane behaviour towards animals in children.
A key aspect of this behaviour was feeding wild birds, and this was included in the pledge taken by new members of the Dicky Bird Society: ‘I hereby promise to be kind to all living things, to protect them to the utmost of my power, to feed the birds in the winter-time, and never to take or destroy a nest.’
Today we take feeding birds for granted, but in Victorian times it was quite unusual, even in towns and cities. By encouraging children to feed wild birds, the Dicky Bird Society, and others like it, promoted a pastime that would go on to forge a lasting bond between the British people and what would eventually become our ‘garden birds’.
The Dicky Bird Society was a highly successful organisation, which continued to run until 1940, attracting hundreds of thousands of children throughout the country, and gaining public support from such Victorian luminaries as John Ruskin, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Florence Nightingale. Together with other children’s humane organisations they could boast millions of members, some of whom came from surprising places, according to social historian Frederick Milton, who has made a special study of the society: ‘There is a letter written to the Dicky Bird Society from children in Dover workhouse, which tells Uncle Toby that they were collecting crumbs from their table to feed to the birds the next day.’
As Frederick Milton notes, this eagerness to engage with feeding birds was not confined to children living in poverty: ‘As the nineteenth century progressed, the number of people actually feeding the birds visibly increased. There was a brand-new generation of individuals who were far more interested in garden birds and their welfare.’
But not everyone in Victorian society thought it necessary, or indeed desirable, to feed birds, as Rob Lambert explains:
The Victorians were caught up in a massive ethical dilemma about feeding garden birds. On the one hand, Victorian values and society were dominated by the concept of ‘Self-Help’ [the title of a book and movement led by Samuel Smiles] – you had to look after yourself, and couldn’t depend on the state for welfare and support in hard times. And they extended this moral code onto the birdlife, so therefore the Victorians believed that by feeding the garden birds, you somehow made them indolent, lazy, and dependent on welfare.
These attitudes would be changed by a series