DUNNOCK DALLIANCES

The dunnock’s wing-flicking display and cheerful spring song is guaranteed to raise the spirits. Birders call the species an LBJ (Little Brown Job), yet there’s nothing dull about its sex life. Some pairs are monogamous. But a male might also breed with two females, or one female with multiple males, or two or more males may share several females. Observations by ornithologist Nick Davies in Cambridge revealed that dunnocks are so promiscuous that males resort to ‘cloaca-pecking’ to remove sperm of rivals before mating.

FIND OUT MORE Bird promiscuity is covered by BBC Radio Four’s The Life Scientific: www. bbc.co.uk/programmes/b098j5l3