How Animals Grieve (14 page)

And that’s the point—we don’t always maintain control of the situation or ourselves. In one sense, times are changing: fewer of us laugh at chimpanzees out of control on the screen, while more of us protest the entertainment industry’s unethical treatment of the apes. But that laudable sea change does not alter the reasons for the enduring popularity of the chaotic ape skit. As Sorenson hints, it’s that sense of being on the edge of chaos, of giving in to our own wild impulses, that may explain our fascination. Primatologist Frans de Waal has described our species’ Janus-faced tendencies, our equal capacity for compassion and for cruelty. Our nature, he says, is split between two ancestral sides; we share a common ancestor with both excitable, violent chimpanzees and calmer bonobos, who are regarded as peacemakers. I could just as well, though, shift the frame and focus on individual variation from chimpanzee to chimpanzee. Like captive Ham in his empathetic response to Melanie Bond’s grief, we humans shine with goodness; like the wild
chimpanzees
filmed by David Watts, we explode with violence, causing pain and sorrow to others, sometimes on the scale of genocide.

I do not believe that people act in these conflicting ways because the patterns are inherited, a fixed part of our nature. Anthropologists’ work with people around the world, and back through time, convincingly demonstrates that there is no single human nature. Our evolutionary legacy is to behave, think, and feel flexibly, according to what happens around us in combination with influence from our genes. We construct our natures in response to a web of experiences that spans from cradle to grave. In a similar though less elaborated way, apes’ variable behavior, and its responsiveness to life experience, tells us that there is no single chimpanzee nature (or bonobo nature, or gorilla or orangutan nature).

Some chimpanzees kill fellow community members in brutal ways. Some chimpanzees mourn others in their group and express compassion for others who mourn. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the chimpanzee who participates in a violent male mob is capable also of mourning. Chimpanzee grief is real, just as chimpanzee violence is real.

8

BIRD LOVE

Every March, a stork flies from South Africa to a small village in Croatia, a distance of eight thousand miles. This bird, who has been given the name Rodan, times his arrival with astonishing consistency, alighting each year in the village on the same day and at about the same hour. In 2010, his fifth year making the journey, he showed up two hours earlier than usual, surprising the small crowd of people gathering to await his return.

But it’s not people that Rodan flies so far to see. It’s his mate Malena, a stork who, years earlier, had been shot by a hunter. Malena’s injuries prevent her from joining Rodan on his annual migration. A kind man in the village cares for her and reports that each year the two birds visibly delight in their reunion. Rodan and Malena make good on their affection, too; at least thirty-two chicks have been born to the couple. It’s Rodan, of course, who tutors the young ones in how to fly. And when the pull of the southern hemisphere takes over, the fledglings accompany him to South Africa.

Video footage shows the two companions grooming and mating on a rooftop in the village. How must Malena feel, left behind year after year by her mate and her offspring? Does she remember, and miss, soaring sky-high across the globe? And what are the reasons for Rodan’s persistent loyalty, his preference for Malena over all other storks? Has he imprinted upon Malena in some adult equivalent to the attachment behavior famously shown by baby geese for Nobel Prize–winning animal behaviorist Konrad Lorenz? Or do we have here an example of bird
love,
which will lead inevitably to grief for the survivor when one of the pair dies?

Bird bonding can be a funny thing. Sometimes it goes awry. Petra, the sole black swan to live a lake in Munster, Germany, has bonded not to another swan but to a swan-shaped white plastic pedal boat. The boat is so integral to Petra’s emotional well-being that when she was sent to a zoo, the boat went with her. In telling Petra’s story in his book
The Nesting Season
, Bernd Heinrich shows there’s a lot of instinct involved in bird attachment. According to Heinrich, storks like Rodan and Malena tend to bond to the nest site more than to each other. Based on stork biology, then, if Rodan arrived in Croatia some year to find a strange female stork in the rooftop nest, he would probably groom her and mate with her, and faithfully return to her next year.

Is one opposite-sex stork, then, as good as any other? Is the newspaper writer who called this male “Rodan the Romantic” going too far? We are willingly beguiled by such stories, and it’s not just storks. When the now-famed nature documentary
March of the Penguins
came out, people flocked to the theater in droves to revel in scenes of warm and fuzzy bird coparenting. Why are we collectively attracted to stories of loyalty on the wing, of bird love, and hope for them to be about genuine emotion more than mere instinct? Could this intense interest in bird bonding relate to our species’ fraught relationship with monogamy?

Now, my best and first reader is my husband, so let me clarify that, twenty-three years into our marriage, I’m as happy to see Charlie after we spend a few days apart as Malena is to see Rodan after his overseas flight. That’s just the way it turned out for us. Mounting evidence suggests, though, that monogamy has never been a natural state for our species. There’s no evidence that nuclear families, centered on a male-female pair bond, were part of our evolutionary past, and even in modern societies they are a minority pattern. To stay with one partner exclusively over the long haul is relatively rare for
Homo sapiens
; why it remains a cultural and emotional ideal for so many of us is an intriguing question.

Do we see in faithful bird pairs an ideal, a hope for our own relationships? “In the movie
Heartburn
,” biologist David Barash writes, “a barely fictionalized account by Nora Ephron of her marriage to Carl Bernstein, the lead character complains to her father, who responds ‘You want
monogamy?
Marry a swan!’
” As it turns out, though, bird pair-bonding isn’t as idyllic as we wish it to be. With evident glee at the opportunity to smite a myth, Barash explains that, in fact, swans aren’t monogamous and neither are many other birds. In one study, female blackbirds paired with vasectomized males continued to lay fertile eggs. DNA studies show that a lot of supposed “monogamy” actually involves what many of us call cheating but scientists call EPCs, extra-pair copulations. These ornithological data are robust and apply across many species. Is it just so much foolishness, then, to get misty-eyed over Rodan and Malena?

Questions arise, too, when we think ahead to what’s in store for the pair. Inevitably, one year, Rodan will not show up at Malena’s nest, because he has flown elsewhere, grown too old to make the journey, or died. Or maybe he will show up only to find Malena gone—or guarded by another male stork. Will the bird who is spurned, or left alone, mourn the loss, or just move on to another partner?

When it comes to monogamy, here’s the thing: myth-busters like Barash merely sow the seeds of a different myth, the myth that it’s naïve and a little bit silly to imagine that birds might care deeply for their partners. But why couldn’t long-term bird mates feel something for each other? Malena’s caretaker sees emotion when the two birds reunite, and even if some EPCs occur along the way, surely cheating doesn’t preclude affection for the original partner. Indeed, scientists make a distinction between social monogamy and sexual monogamy. Animals who don’t show sexual fidelity but still stay together as pairs are labeled socially monogamous. This technical distinction makes some sense, but it strips the birds of an emotional life. Compare this scheme to how we think about the adulterous affair, the human equivalent of EPCs in birds.

Penelope, that Homeric ideal of faithfulness, never cheated on Odysseus during his two-decade absence from home. She pined with loneliness, but stayed true in her body and her heart. Odysseus himself achieved no such spousal fidelity—remember the temptress Circe? We might playfully suggest that Homer, in creating a long-loyal woman and a philandering man, anticipated modern-day pop-psychology stereotypes (the man strays, the woman stays). But despite his adultery, no one thinks to question Odysseus’s love for Penelope. For all our ideals about
monogamy,
we recognize that the death of an exclusive sexual bond need not mean the death of intense love.

Lest it seem that I’ve gone a little over the top in linking storks with Greek epics, consider that Bernd Heinrich, for one, doesn’t shy away from attributing “love” to birds—or “grief,” for that matter. He tells the story of Ruth O’Leary, an elderly woman from Idaho, who has had markedly close emotional ties with individual Canada geese. One goose, named Tinker Belle or TB, had been her companion for two years, even sleeping in Ruth’s bed at night. At one point, TB flew off with a mate, and O’Leary felt sure she’d never see TB again. However, the next year, as she worked in her garden in the company of a young gosling, TB appeared suddenly with her mate.

Unsurprisingly, the gander hung back from human contact. TB, on the other hand, stepped right up into Ruth’s lap, then followed her into the house, where she walked from room to room. In the bedroom, she pulled covers off the bed, perhaps assessing the best place to make a nest. In the living room, she pulled a videocassette off the shelf and looked directly at the television, which she and Ruth had watched together in the past. “Ruth,” Heinrich writes, “took the correct tape,
Fly Away Home
, off the shelf and put it in the videocassette recorder. Tinker Belle leaped up onto the couch and watched more than half the movie—one she had watched often before.” That evening, TB rejoined her mate in flight. A pattern was thus established. The goose pair would show up at Ruth’s in the morning, TB would spend the day with Ruth, and the birds would fly off in the evening. Then one day, the gander was nowhere to be seen. For three days, TB flew around the area, calling and calling for her mate. After that, she sat with her bill under her wing and refused to eat. She became so weak that she staggered.

The gosling had remained at Ruth’s house throughout this period. Once TB lost her mate, Ruth made sure that she interacted with the younger bird. The two swam and ate together, and at night both slept on Ruth’s bed. Gradually, TB emerged from her sorrow and came back to her old self, eventually rejoining a wild flock. O’Leary attributes her recovery to the therapeutic effects of spending time with the younger goose. Here is an interesting echo of what happened with Willa, the cat
who
grieved for her lost sister Carson (as described in
chapter 1
), and whose spirits improved only when a younger cat came into the household.

Stories of bird affection fill Heinrich’s book. Yet it’s not as if attachment is so fixed in the birds’ genes that whenever a male goose comes within courting distance of a female, the two tumble into a sort of preprogrammed rapture. Some couplings are perfunctory, the reproductive imperative carried out in the absence of anything that looks (at least to a human eye) remotely affectionate.

By contrast, Malena and Rodan behave toward each other in ways that may further their common reproductive goals but are not necessary for successful mating. The drive to produce offspring is fixed and the result of mating is inevitable, but the sharing of affection between any two birds is anything but.

And love between long-term partners? It’s a trade-off seared in joy and pain. To love is to gain much—but also to lose when, after years and years, one is again, even if only for a while, alone.

While birds like storks, swans, and geese are linked in our minds with monogamy, the symbolic resonance of crows and ravens is more complicated. Corvids are birds of mystery and contradiction. They symbolize, on the one hand, trickery and deceit, death and doom. Yet they stand just as much for creativity, for healing and prophecy, and for the transformative power of death.

Notice how death figures on both sides of the corvids’ symbolic power, the dark and the light. How could so much opposite meaning be invested by humans in one type of bird? In
Mind of the Raven
, Bernd Heinrich suggests that these contrasting themes emerged at different stages of human history. Ravens were revered, he says, when we as a species were hunters. Back then, where ravens flew, landed, and feasted, large animals could be found, animals whose meat sustained our lives as well. Later, when humans settled down and began to herd domesticated animals, the raven’s association with death shifted. Now the raven became a thief, a stealer of that sustaining meat.

In some societies it was thought—as it still is by some groups—that ravens not only scavenged from animal carcasses but killed animals outright. This view is understandable, Heinrich notes; witnessing a raven
plucking
an eye from a dying calf would be reason enough to suspect the bird as murderous. In Yellowstone National Park in 1985, ravens were witnessed removing the eyes from a dying bison that was stuck in the mud, steam still puffing from its nostrils. It’s the ravens’ way to feast on corpses, and not only those of calves and bison. Humans too may become bird food. Historical accounts suggest that after great battles, when bodies were strewn across a field, ravens flew in to take advantage. This sort of behavior hasn’t helped their ghoulish reputation.

It would be a stretch of the imagination to attribute the death of a bison or a person to a tiny bird, but severely aggressive acts by ravens toward other, smaller animals have been recorded. In the Arctic, a pair of ravens cooperated to kill seal pups resting on the ice. One raven would swoop down and land near a pup’s ice hole. When the second bird drove the pup toward the hole, the first would peck the pup on the head until it died. Are these sorts of observations what led to the term for a social group of ravens, an “unkindness”? Still, that term is less harsh than the one for crows: a “murder.”