to eat—a gorgeous green luna moth that she found in a dusty corner by the sink.
All three of my kids gathered around the recently deceased moth. Other than a slight bird nibble out of one wing, it was intact. Whatever funeral we gave it, this beauty deserved an open casket. The trashcan seemed far too undignified. No, we would scatter the moth to the winds, knowing any number of scavengers would soon delight in this well-preserved, dense package of protein. But first, to fix the spectacle into our own memories, we would paint pictures of it. If any act slows us down and cultivates patience, it is the production of art.
On a little plastic table under a maple tree out front, we ceremoniously spread our supplies around the moth. No masterpiece was going to be produced under these conditions, however. Ezra “accidentally” sprayed us with the hose. Indigo kept bumping the table. And Willow kept trying to eat the paint tubes. But for a few precious moments, we studied the moth and painted our own pictures. And in so doing, we felt the breeze, heard an indigo bunting, and failed to find a shade of green that truly matched the luna’s natural patina.
I’d be lying to say we adopted the pace of nature. But I do believe our corporate compass pointed that way. I’m realistic enough to know that even the cultivation of patience requires patience. Due to our vigil under the maple, maybe my kids will remember the day we found a luna in the house. And what a luna looks like as it blows around an art table.
At the very least, I’m hoping that if any of my kids ever find themselves trying to identify a headless scoter, they’ll be dignified about it. And that they’ll each maintain a well-developed and respectful code of conduct with the natural world. One in which they’ll appreciate seeing a scoter, regardless of what species it is. Nature’s secret, as Emerson wrote, is patience. It rarely rewards those who rush. Paradoxically, adopting the pace of nature is the only way to get ahead. And it’s definitely the only way to get a head you desperately need for proper identification.
Andean cock-of-the-rock
Rupicola peruvianus
7 • THE BIRDS AND THE BEES
Dressing up is a bore. At a certain age, you decorate yourself to attract the opposite sex, and at a certain age, I did that. But I’m past that age.
—Katharine Hepburn
Every kid learns about sex in their own way. I am a case in point. As is true for many kids growing up in the country, a cow pasture formed the border of my backyard. When my friends and I weren’t daring each other to pee on the electric fence, we tended to ignore the bucolic behemoths that placidly ignored us in kind.
But one spring morning, I could not ignore my lazy, lifelong neighbors. Glancing out the window, I noticed a large bull that seemed to be pushing a smaller, wide-eyed cow across the field like a wheelbarrow. The bull completed several lascivious laps around the pasture with his concubine before falling off with an exasperated bellow.
Like lots of coming-of-age kids, I was both curious and confused. The tryst did not seem consensual. But each time the female outran her amorous assailant, she’d stop and wait for him to remount. Not knowing what would happen next, I remained where I was, transfixed by this unexpected cattle concupiscence. I never heard my father behind me until he spoke.
“They’re having sex,” he remarked dryly. As the bull remounted and the wheelbarrow routine resumed, my dad couldn’t resist adding a few more titillating aphorisms, bespeaking his rural Tennessee roots. Mercifully, he left for work before I could respond and reveal any further embarrassment. This episode, which felt more like a low-budget beer commercial, was my first lesson about sex. And I obviously never forgot it.
Now with young children of my own, I jealously applaud my father’s straightforward, opportunistic approach to sex education. I share his style, I’ve learned, but lack his gumption. And since I also lack a pasture out back, I’ve harbored a cattle-less conundrum about the best way to proceed with my own off-spring.
Figuring that water is purest at its source, I turned first to the sex doctor himself, Sigmund Freud. But of all Freud’s writings on sex, it was an unrelated quote that struck me the deepest: “When inspiration fails to come to me,” Freud wrote, “I go halfway to meet it.”
My halfway ended up being pretty far: the foothills of the Andes Mountains in Ecuador. But as Freud predicted, inspiration did indeed meet me, arriving five minutes after I settled down with a dozen of my bleary-eyed college students at a well-known lek, a place where male birds regularly display for females in hopes of landing a mate. We were after one particular bird—the cock-of-the-rock—that has drawn birders from time immemorial. One Andean cock-of-the-rock would have sufficed. We found a half-dozen. The fantastical, blaze-orange birds bobbed their heads and riotously sang as if their lives depended on it. Because that’s just it, we slowly realized: their lives did depend on it.
Everything about the cock-of-the-rock, as with the cattle I’d observed decades before, was predicated on procreation. Pseudo-scholar or not, Freud rightly theorized that sex drives life. Charles Darwin coined the term sexual selection, a force dictating survival as powerfully as his more famous concept, natural selection. At its simplest, sexual selection is nothing more than discerning females choosing the most beautiful—or the fittest—males. Victorian culture wasn’t ready for Darwin’s ideas. Sexual selection gave too much power to women, so Darwin—and his 898-page monograph on the subject—was politely ignored.
But culture changed and as it did, a slew of other scientists put Darwin’s cockamamie theory to the test. They hacked tails off some birds, glued extensions on others, and painted various plumages. Then they did things meddling scientists typically do, assiduously numbering nests, measuring mating attempts, and enumerating eggs. Details differed but the synopsis was the same. In short, female birds love fashion, novelty, and extravagance. In the animal kingdom, crazy long tails, a cacophony of colors, and a jumbled assortment of other doodads are downright arresting to the lady folk; the more otherworldly the outfit and the more dazzling the display, the more smitten the ladies become.
“The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail,” Darwin once lamented, “makes me sick.” But later, in the light of lovemaking, the tail’s purpose became clear. True, a male peacock’s train, toting over 150 elaborate eyespots, makes little sense to the story of survival. But in the story of sex, eyespots are billboards for health and vigor. You can’t be loaded down with parasites, for example, if you’re flitting about the forest in an ostentatious overcoat.
Unsurprisingly, the cock-of-the-rock first caught my attention due to its name alone (juvenile humor may fade but it never disappears entirely). I quickly learned that cocks-of-the-rocks, if that is indeed how you pluralize this bird, are not the worst offenders. Seemingly every bird we encountered in the tropics, and even some in my native state of New York, was in some sense surreal with superlative names to match. Watching the males of species like the beryl-spangled tanager, long-tailed sylph, and flame-faced tanager almost required sunglasses. To females, these shimmering studs are dreamy. Now educated in Freud and Darwin, I can only imagine how a female booby’s heart must flutter when she looks licentiously upon her consort’s powdery blue feet.
There in the morning mist, I realized my students were grasping the power of sex on species survival as memorably as I did so many years back with my convenient cow pasture. So I channeled my father’s opportunism. “What about humans?” I asked my students once we’d left the lek. “Surely sexual selection doesn’t act upon us?”
A pause.
Then,
