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What Brings All the Girls to the Yard?
Is it worth the hassle for him to build a castle or to see if his nest can be put to the test? Is it instinct or a creative imagination that gets the female to say yes?
The male African weaverbird will compete with others to impress its potential mate by building a complex, teardrop-style nest. The male bowerbird, when seeking a partner, will create a geometric, structural masterpiece to make themselves appear more impressive, larger than life, at the entrance of their abode.
Instinct — that innate thing we attribute to most every animal on Earth — and creativity, do go hand in hand, wing in wing, paw in paw. The general goal is to combine practicality and beauty and find security in their creativity.
→The male Japanese pufferfish creates a nest— a sand-made masterpiece up to seven feet wide — to attract his mate.
→Male mice sing their own original, high-pitched songs to captivate their prospective mouse spouse.
→Albatrosses perform intricate dances to find a partner. And did you know that when they fly out to sea, they can spend years without ever landing, but will always return home to their same beloved?
→A wolf’s instinct is to hunt in a pack, but to be successful they must also be creative in their movement…
