Bill Meredith
“We carry in that region known as
the unconscious certain
patterns inherited from ancient days.”
Robert Ardrey
I saw my first mockingbird in the spring of 1953. I was taking a course in
ornithology then, so I was on the lookout for any unfamiliar bird; but in fact
I had been looking for mockingbirds for years. The old song, “Listen to the
Mockingbird,” could still be heard on the radio when I was a child, so I always
looked for them; but I never found one. The reason was that they were not
common in West Virginia then. They originally lived in the southern states
where winters were mild, and gradually extended their range northward, as many
species of plants and animals had been doing since the Ice Age ended 12,000
years ago. They probably arrived in Emmitsburg a good deal earlier by coming up
the Coastal Plain and avoiding the mountains, so they were abundant when we
moved here in 1957.
Mockingbirds live here the year round, but
they haven’t adapted very well to the winter food supply. Their basic food
consists of insects and berries, and they find enough of these to survive; but
they really are not well suited to the usual fare at feeders. They will peck at
suet, but seeds are not on their approved diet. However, this year I have had
one regularly among the customers at my feeder because the Christmas greenery
in our kitchen window box included several branches of holly that were covered
with red berries.
Male and female mockingbirds look alike,
but I knew the one outside my window was a male because of his behavior. As the
days lengthened late in January there came a day when he perched in the tree by
the driveway, stared at my wife’s car, and then begin attacking his reflection
in the windshield and rear-view mirror. To him, the reflection represented
another male mockingbird, a rival who must be driven out of his territory.
Earlier in the winter, he might have been willing to tolerate its presence, but
now things were changing. His physiological processes were like a row of
dominoes; touching the first one set off a chain reaction. The lengthening days
were detected by cells in the suprachiasmatic nucleus of his brain, which
informed his pineal gland, which sent signals to his testes and adrenal glands,
which started pumping hormones into his bloodstream… and suddenly he was
infuriated by the sight of another male. There was no thinking involved, and he
certainly couldn’t have been aware of how silly he looked. Trying to stand on
the windshield and peck at his reflection, he started sliding backward; he
tried to walk forward, but his feet had no traction on the glass, so he
continued pecking as he moon-walked downward, tail first, until he tripped over
the wiper blade and sprawled on the hood. And then, since his reflection was
still there, he flew back up to the top of the windshield and repeated the
whole performance. This went on for five or ten minutes until he noticed that
there was another male mockingbird in the mirror of my truck, and charged off
to battle it. Later in the day I saw him locked in mortal combat with the
mirror of the neighbor’s car across the street.
In my grandparents’ time, country folk
believed it was an omen of death if a bird pecked at a window. Listening to the
old people milling about after church or sitting on the porch on a hot Sunday
afternoon, I would hear things like, “Shame about old Mr. Jones, wasn’t it? I
knew he was going to die; last spring I went to see him and there was this
cardinal that kept flapping against the window and pecking to get in.” The
speaker would be deadly serious, and the other participants in the conversation
would nod solemnly in agreement, ignoring the fact that Mr. Jones was 96 years
old and had cancer for the past two years.
In spite of such superstitions,
territorial behavior was familiar to biologists as far back as Aristotle, who
observed birds chasing each other out of their nesting territories. Birds are
active in the daytime and easy to watch, so there were accurate records of what
they did; but why they did it was a different matter.
Most interpretations were anthropomorphic;
obviously, the bird that could drive competitors out of its territory and have
the food supply for its own family would be better off, so most people assumed
that birds figured this out by logical reasoning. In the 1930s a new wave of
biologists began to interpret behavior that was present in all members of a
species as inherited adaptations to their environment rather than conscious
thought, but their studies were interrupted by World War II.
Mammals were harder to study; many of them
are active at night and even in daytime they are more elusive than birds.
Before the 1950s, much of what was known about their behavior was learned from
watching animals in zoos, where they were confined to small spaces. But in the
‘50s portable movie cameras and tape recorders became available, and a number
of young biologists began to make groundbreaking discoveries about animal
behavior. Jane Goodall’s studies of chimpanzees got the most publicity, but
there were dozens of others that were equally enlightening. It soon became
clear that territorial behavior was commonplace.
Much of the general public became aware of
this through a best-selling book entitled The Territorial Imperative¸ written
by Robert Ardrey in 1966. Ardrey was not a biologist; he had a degree in
anthropology, but made his living by writing plays and movie scripts.
Naturally, he was interested in the roots of human behavior, and the new
studies of animal behavior intrigued him. The thesis of his book was that
territorialism is an inherited form of behavior that evolved in humans just as
it did in many other animals, and in modern life this is manifested in our
tendency to gain property and defend it against trespassers, be they nosy
neighbors, burglars, or invading armies from another country. According to this
view, most wars are the result of territorial behavior.
Ardrey’s book stirred up a lot of
controversy. Some of the criticism was from specialists who quibbled about his
use of terms like “instinct,” which have very precise and limited definitions
among scholars. Other critics said Ardrey’s claims were based only on anecdotes
and assumptions, and there was no experimental evidence for human
territoriality; and still others claimed that even if a territorial urge of
some kind did exist in people, Ardrey’s arguments were oversimplified. The
controversy died down after a while; behavioral scientists admit that the
possibility of human territorialism is an intriguing concept, but definitive
proof that Ardrey was either right or wrong is yet to emerge. The only lasting
effect is the expression, “territorial imperative,” which has become part of
our vocabulary. And, of course, there are a few people of my age who remember
that the title of the first chapter in Ardrey’s book was “Of Men and
Mockingbirds.”
Read other articles by Bill Meredith