Biologist Bridget Stutchbury was once introduced at a university lecture as someone who "probably knows more about sex than anyone in this room."
Her lectures to first-year biology classes, she writes in "The Bird Detective," often elicit giggles, elbowing and knowing looks.
Although she's an acclaimed scientist who has published groundbreaking papers on the lives of songbirds, Stutchbury has been able to popularize much of her academic output for general audiences. She is willing to put up with a few giggles to get her point across.
In her first groundbreaking book "Silence of the Songbirds," Stutchbury outlined how migratory songbirds are disappearing at a frightening rate. And now in "The Bird Detective: Investigating the Secret Lives of Birds," she focuses on the surprising mating habits of our avian friends.
The sex lives of birds? You'd think it dull, but thanks to recent advances in DNA testing, it's an intriguing subject worthy of a non-fiction detective tale.
And bird watching? That's a gripping story, too. Stutchbury fills her story with plenty of drama -- defending herself from attacks by bees and poisonous snakes on annual expeditions in Central America; keeping her young children entertained with ant colonies as they come along with her on jungle walks; or remaining patiently frozen during wintertime, pre-dawn searches for the rare prairie chicken in North Dakota.
Married to an evolutionary biologist whose own international research with birds helps fill out her chapters, Stutchbury spent a few falls and winters close to home when she took a teaching position at York University. In the suburbs of Toronto, she became intrigued with the ordinary birds of her own backyards -- the common birds that seemed to stick close to their mates.
She discovered some dirty secrets in the nests.
"Most of the birds that we're familiar with in our backyards appear to be monogamous … you see a male and a female raising a family together," Stutchbury told CTV's Canada AM this week. "But the DNA testing we've done shows that about half the females cheat on their mates."
Through patient observation, and by reaching into nests to borrow baby birds for 10 minutes or so, she was able to take samples and do some paternity testing on the little ones.
What did The Bird Detective discover? The male bird's worst enemy is his immediate neighbor.
"When the female sneaks around, she goes next door, and then visits the male, mates with him, then comes back," she said. "And her own mate is the one who does all the work raising the young, but he's not always the father."
In the bird world, it seems, the male does a lot of work. Forest birds can't spot each other easily, due to the foliage, so females keep track of the males by listening to them. They keep track of the guys by listening to their song. And it's up to the males to keep the song strong. The book has some great charts to explain how the bird equivalent of the larynx makes such unique songs for their female conquests.
"They're judging the quality of these guys through their voice," Stutchbury explains. "Not just how much they can sing, because singing takes a lot of energy.'
The female bird is listening for how difficult the piece is, how rapidly the male can make those sounds, the frequency ranges. "So the male can never let up, the females are always listening."
For amateur birders, the book provides more incentive to keep piling on the seeds into the feeder and keep watching.
"Birds are way more complicated than we could possibly imagine," Stutchbury says. "You see a robin on your back fence singing or a little warbler in the trees, it's easy to kind of write them off as being simple-minded creatures, but they're incredibly complex. "
"I think when we can see and understand the depth of their social behaviour, how they sneak around on each other, all the strategies for raising their young, it should make us all the more impressed."
But Stutchbury tried to walk a fine line with the book, and not lead readers to jump to any conclusions about human behaviour as she explored the communities, families and mating habits of birds.
"People want to draw parallels because they think it's interesting," she says, "but as a scientist you have to be careful -- bird brains are very different than human brains in the way they think and perceive…
"But there are similarities," she adds. "Males will always compete for females. I don't care if you study insects or bats or birds or humans. The competition between males for female partnership is always there. And the females will always be very selective… because females always invest so heavily in reproduction, whether they are laying eggs or having twins, most animals, the females bear the burden of parental of parenting, and because of that asymmetry they will always be pickier than males."
Stutchbury is generous in her book with credit to her graduate students and other bird experts -- whose research and discoveries have helped inform her work over the years. It's obvious she's driven to spread the word about the bird world's precarious struggle for survival, and finding new ways to do it all the time.
In addition to her teaching, writing and environmental work, Stutchbury is also working on an innovative education program for elementary school students.
The Bird Sleuth program was developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and teaching kits provide an "inquiry-based curriculum" that gets kids outdoors -- learning about how to help save birds and the environment.
Students involved in the Bird Sleuth program are invited to join a "citizen science project," by taking up bird watching in their communities and submitting data on their spottings. All of this data is important for understanding the effects of climate change, the environment, and the fate of endangered bird populations.
"You can learn how to collect data, put the data on data sheets, record it electronically through the Internet, and you can go online and analyze the data," Stutchbury says. "It's taking off kind of slowly in Canada but it's not for lack of interest … My role is to just make sure that the science teachers know about this."
