dances, flights, movements of the most extravagant nature, all of them spectacular, all of them elements of a veritable spectacle. And the equally astonishing repetition of the routines involved in the process of setting up a territory. In 1920, Henry Eliot Howard described how a male reed bunting, observed from his home in the English countryside of Worcestershire, set about establishing his territory. The bird chose a marshy area planted with small alders and willows. Any of these trees would have provided a suitable perch from which to survey the surrounding area, but the bunting chose one in particular, which would in a sense become the most important spot in the chosen area, the bird’s ‘headquarters’, as Howard would call them. This would be the base from which he would signal his presence by his singing, monitor the movements of his neighbours and go off in search of food. Howard observed a specific routine taking shape around what would become the centre of the bird’s territory: the bird would leave the tree, go and perch in a nearby shrub, then on a bulrush a little further away, before returning once more to the tree. These journeys would be repeated in all directions with remarkable regularity. Their endless repetition mapped out the territory and gradually established its limits.
Other descriptions are possible. These would quickly follow, since Howard had clearly opened the floodgates to a whole stream of research in this area and was widely acknowledged by all the scientists working in this field as its genuine founder. His book Territory in Bird Life, published in 1920, not only provides meticulously detailed descriptions but also sets out a coherent theory which provides the explanation for these observations. According to Howard, the birds are engaged in securing a territory which will enable them to mate, build a nest, protect their young and find enough food to provide for their brood.
I should point out, first of all, that Howard was not a professional scientist but, rather, a naturalist who was passionate about observing birds, an activity to which he devoted the first hours of each day, before going to work. But scientists would quickly follow in his footsteps, acknowledging him as the true pioneer of this new field of research. Territory, as Howard understood it, could now be regarded as a valid scientific subject and could be explained in terms of the ‘functions’ it sustained in relation to the survival of the species. Moreover, in order to signal the arrival of this subject in the scientific domain, ornithologists would refer to a ‘pre-territorial’ period, indicating any theoretical speculations which preceded Howard. Secondly, it should also be pointed out that Howard was not in fact the first person to have associated territorial behaviour with the functions it could sustain and with the demands of reproduction. Two other writers had done so before him, notably Bernard Altum, the German zoologist who, in 1868, in a book which would not however be translated until considerably later, had developed a detailed theory of territory, and another amateur, Charles Moffat, a journalist with a passion for natural history, whose writings, published in 1903 in the relatively obscure Irish Naturalist’s Journal, would escape the notice of scientists. If Howard is acknowledged as the true pioneer of research in this area, it is first of all because he was the first writer, among those read by English and American ornithologists, to propose a detailed and coherent theory in a domain hitherto dominated by a great many speculative hypotheses.1 In addition, Howard was responsible for the growing popularity of a new method focusing on the life stories of individual birds. This is significant in that it was a matter not just of telling the story of birds but of becoming familiar with their ‘lives’. We should not forget that, until then, many ornithologists and amateurs studied birds largely by killing them or by taking their eggs to form collections or to draw up categories.
What scientists refer to as the ‘pre-territorial period’ in relation to the theory of territory therefore indicates the fact that any observations tended to be relatively fragmentary in nature and lacked any real theoretical structure. The proverb from Zenodotus cited as an epigraph to this chapter, for example, would be revived at a later stage in connection with the theory that robins like solitude. Before Zenodotus, Aristotle had observed, in his Historia animalium, that animals, and, more specifically, eagles, defend the area which constitutes their feeding ground. He also observed the fact that, in certain areas, where food was in short supply, only one pair of ravens would be found.
For others, territory would first of all be associated with rivalry between males over females. The defended area would either enable the male to ensure exclusive access to any female who settled there, and would therefore amount to a problem of jealousy, or it would provide him with a ‘stage’ on which to sing and perform displays in order to attract a potential partner. This would be one of Moffat’s theories. In such a case, territory counts not as a space but as a behavioural whole.
Not surprisingly, the hypothesis of the robin’s love of solitude failed to gain a place in any scientific writings. The theory arguing that a territory enables a bird to guarantee exclusive access to the resources necessary to its survival would, by contrast, long be considered a pertinent one and would gain favour with a great many ornithologists. The argument that territory is associated with a problem of competition around females would, however, dominate the pre-territorial scene for a considerable time (and was notably favoured by Darwin). Controversial as it was, it would not be completely abandoned and would recur frequently, in one form or another, in scientific writings – no doubt encouraged by the attraction certain scientists have for the high drama often involved in competition and in others (sometimes involving the same people) because of a reluctance to abandon the notion that females are simply resources for males. Howard, however, vigorously challenged this theory of competition around females because it failed to fit certain of his observations. He wrote moreover that it held only for as long as it was believed that such confrontations exclusively involved males. In fact, as he pointed out, in certain species females fought with other females, couples with couples, or even sometimes a couple of birds might attack a solitary male or female. And what explanation might be given for the fact that, in species which travel to breeding sites, the males sometimes arrive considerably in advance of the females and immediately engage in conflict? Territorial behaviour nevertheless remains a predominantly male affair. As Howard points out, if the females behaved in the same way and isolated themselves, birds would never succeed in getting together!
The notion that birds could establish living spaces and would then protect their exclusive right to such zones is not a new one and had already been observed by Aristotle, Zenodotus and some later writers. However, the term ‘territory’ was not mentioned and would appear for the first time with reference to birds only in the course of the seventeenth century. In her book on this subject, published in 1941, Margaret Morse Nice, an American ornithologist, indicates that the first reference to territory occurs in a book by John Ray (1627–1705) entitled The Ornithology of Francis Willughby and published in 1678. As the title suggests, Ray’s book focuses on the work carried out by his friend Francis Willughby (1635–1672). With reference to the common nightingale, Ray cites another writer, Giovanni Pietro Olina, who published a treatise on ornithology entitled Uccelliera, ovvero, Discorso della natura, e proprietà di diversi uccelli in Rome in 1622. This treatise turns out to be a book on the various ways of catching and looking after birds in order to set up aviaries: ‘It is proper to this Bird at his first coming (saith Olina) to occupy or seize upon one place as its Freehold, into which it will not admit any other Nightingale but its mate.’ Ray also mentions the fact, again according to Olina, that the nightingale ‘has a peculiarity that it cannot abide a companion in the place where it lives and will attack with all its strength any who dispute this claim.’2 But according to ornithologists Tim Birkhead and Sophie Van Balen,3 another writer, Antonio Valli da Todi, in fact preceded Olina in 1601 with a book on birdsong, and it is highly likely, given how similar the observations are in both books, that the latter may have copied his predecessor. He describes, for example, how the nightingale ‘chooses a freehold, in which it will admit no other nightingale but its female, and if other nightingales try to enter that place, it starts singing in the centre of this site.’ Valli da Todi would estimate the size of this territory by observing that its extent corresponded to a long stone’s throw. It should be noted incidentally that Valli da Todi himself derived much of his information from a work by Manzini, published in 1575. This latter does not, however, discuss the issue of territory.
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