Grebes and Gender Politics: How Birds Can Help Us See Humans Differently
Behold the great crested grebe! They are quite extraordinary looking birds, with striking black, white and orange faces and the sloped foreheads and slanting bills characteristic of many grebes. Grebes are great divers mostly found in freshwater lakes, including Lake Trasimeno. The water will be smooth and still, without a bird in sight, and suddenly the grebe pops up, only to dive again a minute later and resurface some distance off. When they puff out their cheeks, stretch their necks, and raise their crests, it is easy to see how they may be related to flamingoes.
Great crested grebes are best known for their extraordinary courtship dance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORqblRpH9Eg. They turn and dip their beaks toward their backs and then face one another, shaking their heads and flaring their orange ruffs.
Even out of breeding season, a mated pair of grebes are a welcome sight, swimming so close together that it is easy to imagine that they are about to intertwine their necks, facing and mirroring one another. As I watch them, I reflect on their symmetry, the complete identity, at least to my eye, between male and female.
The conventional wisdom about birds is that contrary to humans, the males are brightly colored and given to elaborate display, while the females are definitely the drabber sex. Compare the peacock, a word that now refers to anyone who takes elaborate care with their appearance, and the peahen, or any rooster with his brood of chickens.
Given the vast variety of birds, you will probably not be surprised to learn that some female birds are actually flashier than their male counterparts, such as the belted kingfisher, a North American bird found near lakes and bays. Both male and female are vibrantly blue and white with black eye masks, but the female has a rusty band across her belly.
In other species, most notably raptors, females can be twice the size of males. Katie Fallon, founder of the Avian Conservation Center of Appalachia, reviews various theories for why female eagles, falcons, hawks and owls are almost all larger than males and able to hunt bigger prey. She favors the theory that females spend more time incubating eggs than males and thus need to be able to fight off would be egg-eaters like raccoons and other raptors, while the males’ job primary job is to find food and small rodents are the most plentiful source of food. When hunting mice and voles, being compact and fast is an advantage.
But what of male and female birds that look almost exactly alike, at least to the non-specialized eye? In addition to grebes, think blue jays, crows, mourning doves, black capped chickadees, house wrens, and many others. In the United States at least, we live in an era in which gender is a highly contested subject. For baby boomers like me, and certainly for my parents’ generation (Depression babies), gender identities like transgender, gender fluid, non-binary, can sometimes be challenging. We have lived most of our lives in a strictly gender binary world. Indeed, the first question anyone of our generations asks about a baby is whether it is a boy or a girl. In describing another human being, gender used to be inferable from names; as names become increasingly gender-neutral, whether someone is a male or female “Madison,” “Jordan,” “Riley,” or “Jamie,” is still a highly salient fact.
Many feminists of my generation have spent decades challenging the countless gendered assumptions that people — men and women — make about us because we are identified as female. But most of us, at least until recently, did not think to question our gender identity, or more fundamentally, question that human beings have a specific gender identity — either male or female.
Watching birds, however, leads me to approach the question differently. I think about goldfinches. American gold finches have a marked different between male and female. The breeding male, as Donna Tartt made famous in her novel The Goldfinch, and as can be observed at many a backyard feeder, is bright, bright yell0w — a yellow we might call “canary yellow” if we weren’t describing a goldfinch. The female is a handsome bird, but definitely more demurely colored, in a kind of olive green and a handsome black and white zigzag pattern down her back when her wings are folded.
The European goldfinch, on the other hand, while altogether more brightly attired in white, red, black, tan, and a flash of yellow, is “monomorphic” — one shape and color for both male and female (there are differences, but they are subtle — the female’s red mask is slightly smaller than the male’s).
When I look at the European goldfinch, as when I look at the crested grebe, I begin to wonder why assigning gender categories seems so essential to identification. I am looking at a bird. A bird with a specific size, shape, color, and set of behaviors. Some of those behaviors are unique to the male, others to the female, some are joint, depending on the species. But for many species, what I see is a goldfinch or a grebe or a blue jay or a crow.
Why can’t I similarly look at a person and simply see a human being? Birding may help teach me to do just that.
