The truth has been revealed about Donald Duck. The familiar, lovable “quack” does not belong to Donald at all. It belongs to the female of the species.
It appears that in the haste to describe and record birdsong in the past, virtually all songs and calls have been ascribed to males.
A new book is setting the world straight however and, in an ultimate victory for women’s rights, is pointing an accusing finger at a male-dominated birding world.
When we hear the beautiful call of a bird from a high bough, we’re told it’s likely to be a male – singing for territory, or belting out tunes to woo a female. Author Mark Constantine urges us to think again and turn our ears to the hidden world of female birdsong.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Constantine is in tune with females and wants to promote the female perspective. He is founder of the British cosmetics firm Lush.
The songs, sounds and sights of female birds have historically been overlooked in field guides and sound archives. In contrast, female birds sing for territorial displays, to ward off other females and to attract extra males, according to Lucy McRobert, a researcher who studied the issue for Constantine’s guidebook, The Sound Approach to Birding
Early research into birds and birdsong came from Europe and male European ornithologists were not simply sexist, they exported their assumptions about male birdsong around the world.
Constantine says: “Everything we believe about our birdsong isn’t true. I love the fact that Donald Duck is actually a female – he quacks like a female. Most people don’t realise that the female mallards quack and the males don’t.”
The mallard, from which domestic ducks are derived, is closely related to Australia’s Pacific black duck.
Constantine was inspired to take a closer look at female bird sounds by Jasmine Donahaye, the author of Birdsplaining, which highlights what are termed the sexism of field guides published before the 1980s. Studying illustrations in early guides, Donahaye noticed how the male birds were drawn in an “upright, bold, declarative” position while the females were often depicted in the background, half-obscured by the male, and “bent over, submissive and demure”.
In Constantine’s book are some surprising revelations. Females of a European mountain species, the alpine accentor, sing an irresistible song when alone, and swiftly attract male company. Older females who lay the biggest clutches of eggs are the ones with the more elaborate songs.
As well as singing, Constantine argues that female birds set the ever-changing trends in avian songs.
“The female bird conducts the orchestra. She chooses in all regards what the male birds are going to sing,” he says.
And as for the Donalds of this world, like myself and the other more famous American one, the birdsong book reveals we are not all what we are quacked up to be.