Birds and bias
The power – and consequences - of storytelling
I’m still not really sure how it happened but several times this year, I’ve found myself under a reconstructed Tyrannosaurus Rex in a quiet museum after hours, surrounded by beautiful queers, allies and dear ones, talking about sex bias and intersex erasure. I’ve been hosting the english version of the beautifully provocative, anti-ableist, and decolonial ‘Queering Nature’ tour in Berlin. I even got to help with the creation of the tour, invited in as queer ecology consultant (which is now a thing). It’s all been really special.
I’ve always been a dino geek - which makes sense as I’ve always been a bird geek as well and it is now scientific consensus that birds belong to the clade Dinosauria - birds are the dinosaurs that survived. I know I’m not alone in this passion and someone somewhere has written a PhD on why queers love birds and other dinosaurs so much. I haven’t found it yet, but I know it’s out there.
Western ornithology and palaeontology have a long history of sex bias. Female birds have been systematically overlooked while males have been prioritised in research and even in conservation measures. And, as is so often the case, the myths that western scientists have created about birds and other dinosaurs tell us more about the observers than the observed.
Here I want to share a few stories that reveal the power – and consequences - of bias and myth making.
More than two
Female birds are often undercounted and overlooked. To understand some of the reasons, we need to first look at what scientists call ‘sexual dimorphism’ (di meaning two + morph meaning shape). Many birds are categorised as sexually dimorphic, meaning males and females are obviously different to each other, usually in a visible way.
It’s an imperfect term, not only because determining sex is complicated but because many species are ‘dimorphic’ in ways we might not perceive. Common Starlings for example have different plumage patterns that only show up in UV light - which they see, and humans don’t. For a very long time they were considered non-dimorphic until someone thought to look at them how they look at each other, revealing far more complexity than expected.
Additionally, dimorphic suggests there are only two sexes, erasing the fact that many of these species also have intersex individuals. Mallards and house sparrows are all familiar examples: every single book and reference will describe them as dimorphic and yet intersex mallards and house sparrows are well documented.
In fact, intersex is common across bird species. Some of the most stunning (to my eyes) are the ‘bilateral gynandromorphs’. As the name suggests, these individuals have a visible split in plumage down the middle - one side with male-typical coloration, the other side with female-typical coloration. Dig around the internet and you will find photos of intersex, bilateral gynandromorph birds including cardinals and chickens, as well as other groups like butterflies and grasshoppers.
With all my concerns about objectifying or utilising other species in mind, I don’t mind admitting that the forums of intersex, trans and non-binary people gushing over these photos, and feeling kinship with gynandromorph sparrows and butterflies, lifts my tired heart.
Ignoring females
But let’s assume for now that some species have male typical and female typical plumage – think of peacock males with those famously impressive tails and the more agile, better camouflaged, peahen females. (it’s a big simplification - there are intersex peacocks too).
If you’re a researcher - or a museum collector - males might be easier to recognise and locate. They also might get more attention in a museum.. The result is that in five of the largest natural history museums, there is a 60-40 skew towards male bird specimens. As these collections are often used for research, the bias gets perpetuated further.
Another fascinating element is bird song. Let’s say you’re travelling to a habitat you’ve never been to before. There’s a bird that is totally unfamiliar to you, singing beautifully from a tree branch. Given no other information would you think the bird is male or female?
For centuries, there has been a dominant myth in western science that male birds sing, and females don’t. Therefore, if a researcher hears a bird singing, they’re more likely to identify it as a male. This creates a self-fulfilling loop: singing birds are assumed male and therefore only males appear to sing. This was the case with European Robins. For a long time, ornithologists assumed that only males robins sang and as males and females look pretty much the same (to us), if a bird was singing they were classified as male. But recent research shows that in the autumn and winter, when food becomes scarcer, female robins sing to defend their territories. Not only that but they show similar vocal ability to males - they sing beautifully.
In fact, female song seems to occur in thousands of species and is so widespread that researchers have concluded that the ancestor of all songbirds had female song. To the surprise of no-one, this great revealing of female bird song has tracked with the number of women working as researchers in animal behaviour.
Conserving males
Sex bias is a powerful force and its consequences even stretch to conservation policy.
I found one study from 2019 particularly revealing. Researchers followed several migratory songbird species and looked at their winter habitats in Central and South America. Females in the study went to dry, shrubby habitats at lower elevation, while males went to higher, humid forests. In all these habitats there is deforestation and there are conservation efforts to protect the habitats… or at least some of them.
The study revealed that the habitats used by female Golden-winged Warblers were being deforested at twice the rate of the male habitats and yet conservation strategies were being focused on the habitats used by males. Females - less loud, less brightly coloured and harder to observe than the males - were being overlooked. And as a consequence their habitat was being destroyed faster.
As one of the researchers concluded: “Conservation plans are stronger -- and more likely to be effective -- when they explicitly consider the needs of females.”
I’m honestly saddened that this needed to be stated, but here we are.
Good mother dinosaurs
One last story to reveal how far some people will go to project their culturally-specific assumptions.
Think of some dinosaur names (I know you can) and you’ll notice how many of them have the ending ‘saurus’ - Tyrannosaurus, Stegosaurus, Spinosaurus, Ankylosaurus (my favourite).
‘Saurus’ comes from the Greek word for reptile, and it is grammatically male. There is a female ending - saura - but it seems to be reserved for just a sprinkling of species with traits deemed particularly feminine (Davis, 2024). Maiasaura is a rare example, and the naming of this species speaks volumes.
Maiasaura was a large herbivorous hadrosaur and in 1978 adult fossils were found for the first time (possibly) on top of nests, eggs and embryos and in close proximity to fifteen juveniles. These finding suggested parental and social care behaviour and to those in charge of naming the species, it also suggested femininity. For them, presumably, taking care of the kids was a female role because Maiasaura was gifted the elusive female suffix and the name ‘good mother lizard.’
Assumptions and stereotypes: even extinct dinosaurs aren’t safe from our stories.