A swallow tale – emotional birds

science Friday, April 9, 2010. Post by David Bradley

A friend of mine recently posted a link to the series of photos of the dying swallow and its purported mate attending to it. It was all over the web a couple of years ago, and supposedly sold out a French newspaper. Now, everyone is once again getting all emotional about the supposed feelings of the male bird and its “wife”.

Now, I’m not going to claim that we can know for certain what level of sentience and emotions any animal might feel, but I’m afraid this sequence of photos is artificial and entirely scripted to appeal to human sentimentality.

The photos are of unknown provenance but there are claims that they were originally published in a French newspaper, a Chinese website, and various photo sites. Almost always the person posting the photos says that millions of people have been moved and cried at these images. How do they know?

More worrying is the fictionalised anthropomorphing of the scene to suggest that somehow the male swallow understands that his mate has been fatally wounded by a car and that he pines for her, attempts to a rescucitation and then mourns her death, when she finally succumbs to her injuries. The captions interpret the scene in one way, but can we know for sure what’s really going on in the male’s brain?

Does he really cry “with adoring love”? Did he really stand beside her body “with sadness and sorrow”? How can anyone know? Who’s to say what was going on in this scene? Where’s the evidence that it was even a mating pair? Has an expert even confirmed that the injured bird is female and the other male? In the “feeding” seen it appears as if the male’s parenting instinct has kicked in and he is simply responding to the static female’s call as if she were a screaming chick in the nest.

There is even a suggestion that the male tried to move the female, perhaps he did, but that is not obvious from a still photograph, video evidence would be a lot more convincing. More to the point though, this looks more like a mating attempt. Birds attempting to move dead birds has not been reported in the scientific literature, but observation of necrophilia has.

Sad as this scene appears to our eyes, this is not proof that swallows have feelings akin to human emotions. One might even speculate that the next photograph, missing from the sequence, shows the male pecking at the carcass of the female. Who’s to say?

It’s not about being superior, it’s about the misinterpretation of observations and the anthropomorphising ofanimals. Yes, I can see a chimp “caring” for another, and elephants and pet dogs alike seem to suffer loss. But, my point is that we cannot actually know anything about another species’ level of self-awareness or emotions, we don’t even understand our own!

Do birds really fall in love and have wives, as implied by the narrative? Is the neural circuitry of their brains sophisticated enough to recognise the imminent death of a mate?

As to the specific photos and their descriptions, the “feeding” could be an innate response to the sound and posture of the injured bird the male mistaking it for a hungry chick. The nudging and claims that he’s trying to help his partner fly? Well…I’m afraid there are countless examples of that kind of behaviour in the literature and often it is simply the male attempting to mate with an apparently “willing” partner.

Yes, animals deserve our respect, but this kind of cartoonish photo story does nothing to inform and educate, it simply distorts reality and preys on our sentimentality. If it were a squashed snail and his mate would it have garnered so much attention, what about sharks or hyenas? Jellyfish?

David Bradley

April 9th, 2010 at 8:29 am

There’s an interesting discussion on this photographic sequence on Snopes.com which lingers rather too long, I think on the necrophilia angle, but does raise several intriguing points concerning the nature of survival and animal anxiety that I would agree with. It’s the attempt to draw parallels with human emotions in this meme that irritates me somewhat.

http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=57394

David Bradley

April 9th, 2010 at 8:33 am

Quite bizarrely, when I posted the link to this page in response to that of my friend, the captch I had to fill in asked me to type “Mr Theories”…could be my nickname, eh?

Maria Arias

April 9th, 2010 at 10:44 am

Hello David! nice article! very true! and touch me since I am an animal lover, sometimes we do distortion of the reality, as a prove I believe my cat almost talks to me, but in an “animals rights” point of view and not so much looking at the “science”, it was good if using these pictures (there were real or not) that makes people to have a better behavior and more consideration to those animals.

David Bradley

April 9th, 2010 at 11:15 am

@Maria I don’t think one can have a rational debate about a subject if one invokes fictional elements in the argument.

David Bradley

April 9th, 2010 at 11:54 am

Further discussion on this here

Wildbird

June 16th, 2010 at 5:50 am

This almost seems incredible the bird loses his mate and mourns her death almost like people do think of this as a bird versian of LOVE STORY

David Bradley

June 16th, 2010 at 8:30 am

Did you read my post? Where is there any evidence whatsoever of the bird “mourning” the death of its mate? It’s total and utter anthropomorphised, sentimentalist bull.

Miharu

July 7th, 2010 at 11:05 pm

Hello, there…

so what do you make of this picture?

>> http://alchemyotaku17.deviantart.com/art/Wake-Up-Honey-170340769?q=&qo=

David Bradley

July 8th, 2010 at 8:46 am

@Miharu Was it set up to cash in on the swallow tale?

Anita H

July 12th, 2010 at 6:56 am

I think the photos speak for themselves. Birds DO mate for life.

David Bradley

July 12th, 2010 at 8:36 am

@Anita I’m afraid that’s abject nonsense. Birds are repeatedly referred to as monogamous and in the 1960s David Lack claimed that 92 percent of the 9,700 bird species are loyal to a single partner. Blackbirds, kestrels, chickadees, woodpeckers, even swans and certainly cuckoos are known (from DNA and vasectomy studies) to mate just as promiscuously as humans.

Donna

August 5th, 2010 at 11:02 pm

If you think birds don’t have real emotions, then try spending 21 years with a cockatoo! Don’t be so damned arrogant about how inferior other animals are to humans. Take a lesson from Native Americans – “We are all relatives.”

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