Bitch: On the Female of the Species

by Lucy Cooke

‘Be thou like the dunnock – the male and female impeccably faithful to each other,’ proclaimed the Reverend Frederick Morris in 1853. Morris was a keen ornithologist and author of a popular Victorian book on birds that encouraged his readers to emulate the modest lifestyle of the ‘humble and homely’ dunnock, aka the common brown hedge sparrow (Prunella modularis). The good reverend was unaware that this was in fact permission for his female flock to seek out a second lover and copulate over two hundred and fifty times with both males in order to start a family. A decree which, as Nick Davies, the Cambridge zoologist who first documented the female dunnock’s liberated sex life, wryly noted, would have resulted in ‘chaos in the parish