Evolution as a process / edited by Julian Huxley, A.C. Hardy, E.B. Ford.

Date:
1954
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Evolution as a process / edited by Julian Huxley, A.C. Hardy, E.B. Ford. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    JAMES FISHER Evolution and Bird Sociality ^ m ^ hat birds are a class of fundamentally social animals is an idea that has only slowly emerged from the sea of ornithology. Lashed Il by the winds of the territory theory, the tides of the aggressive m theory of bird behaviour have run long and deep, breached some walls and left some floods behind. The inundation has, of course, deeply enriched and fertilized our knowledge and understanding of birds. To two pioneer workers must go the credit for the wonderful awakening of human interest in bird behaviour, and for the eventual and unequivocal surrender by academic biology to the notion that birds are the most observable of all wild animals, and that their study is not only respectable but desirable. In establishing upon such a strong foundation of research and logical argument the ideas that much bird display is aggressive, much bird coloration intimidative, and that a defended territory is the property of most bird pairs, Huxley and Howard led the way to investigations which are now professionally occupying some scores of trained zoologists at the universities of many countries; as well as an uncountable number of amateurs whose published work is often of academic quality. Excellent recent summaries of the state of our knowledge of bird display and behaviour have been published, of which perhaps the most important is that of Armstrong (1947). Yet it would be hard to guess from this scholarly work, or from several other similar contemporary summaries, that birds are social animals. It is true that the masterly work done in recent years in Europe by Lorenz (1935, 1938) and Tinbergen (1939) has been largely on the behaviour of overtly social birds such as geese, jackdaws, night-herons and herring-gulls, but this work has largely concerned the role of the individual within this social network. As example, a recent general discussion by Tinbergen on the biological significance of bird behaviour (1952c, pp. 370-1) does not mention sociality. It has taken a long time for the general studies of W. C. Allee (1931, 1938), based mainly on