Lies and Light
On demagogues and songbirds
DISHONESTY has been in the news of late. And yet long before humans arrived on the scene to tell them, lies have been a way of life on Earth.
Opossums feign death to trick predators. Caterpillars can resemble anything from snakes to twigs to bird shit. And certain plants look like rotting flesh, attracting flies that become unwitting pollinators.
Fraud in nature is evolution in action — wild things doing whatever to get by in the struggle for existence. Humans, of course, lie for their own selfish reasons: survival, lust, demagoguery, greed, cruelty, power.
So what are we to make of birds singing in the midst of winter? After all, songbirds generally make music in the warmth of spring — their time to attract mates and raise young. And yet here in the north, for example, the Black-capped Chickadees have been singing their sweet, plaintive “feee-beee” song of courtship since January.
Global warming? Nope, not really. The chickadees routinely sing in sub-zero temperatures, those brutal days when many of us might otherwise shiver and believe that the cold, like certain humans, can be a force of evil. Even as the spring breeding season remains months off, more birds are erupting into song every day.
