Bird of the Month: Dunnock
In 1951, the ornithologist Max Nicholson argued for a change of seven birds’ names. One was ‘dunnock’ for the dun-coloured Prunella modularis.
It was a name first recorded in 1475 but had been supplanted by ‘hedge sparrow’. Dunnock was the only one of Nicholson’s suggestions to stick. But the bird’s change of name is nothing compared with its change of reputation.
Tim Birkhead ( The Wisdom of Birds) writes that even Charles Darwin dismissed female birds’ promiscuity, although he knew it was undeniable. Darwin preferred to see them as paragons of Victorian moral convention in sexual matters – not least because his daughter Etty was correcting proofs of his The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871).
Birkhead writes, ‘For Darwin, male promiscuity was the norm and an important part of his vision of sexual selection’; female promiscuity was decidedly not. He quotes Darwin on birds in Descent: ‘It is shown from various facts, given hereafter, and by the results fairly attributable to sexual selection, that the female, though comparatively passive, generally exerts some choice and accepts one male in preference to the others.’
Darwin’s conclusion led to a century of mistaken belief. The Victorian ornithologist Reverend Francis Orpen Morris notoriously urged his congregation to follow the example of the dunnock: ‘Unobtrusive, quiet and retiring, without being shy, humble and homely in its deportment and habits, sober and unpretending in its dress, while still neat and graceful, the Dunnock exhibits a pattern which many of a higher grade might imitate.’
From casual observation, this is a fair reflection of the dunnock’s behaviour and appearance. As John Clare wrote in Hedge Sparrow:
The tame hedge sparrow in its russet dress
Is half a robin for its gentle ways W H Hudson ( British Birds) wrote that its ‘favouritism’ with bird-lovers rivalled the ‘robin redbreast, the swallow and the martin’ – this despite its being ‘the least attractive’ of birds, which seems harsh. It is indeed ‘neat’, and its ‘russet dress’ is undeniably elegant. But now we know that dunnocks are polyandrist (females copulating with more than one male) and polygamist (the reverse).
The hedge sparrow was famed for the beauty of its sky-blue eggs cushioned in its mossy nest. Previously it was pitied as a prime victim of the cuckoo: The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long, That it had its head bit off by its young (Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 1, Scene 4) Sadly, cuckoos have declined in England by 70 per cent since 1995, and half Britain’s hedgerows have gone since the Second World War.
The paragon upheld by the Reverend Morris has been mugged by science and exposed as a byword for smutty behaviour. It seems as much a victim of the sexual revolution as it was a beneficiary of Victorian decorum.
Those of us brought up to think first of those sky-blue eggs at the mention of dunnocks may deem Darwin right to have preserved Etty’s blissful ignorance at the expense of scientific truth.