Bitch: On the Female of the Species

by Lucy Cooke

Much like Victorian ladies at a dinner party, female birds had no reason to compete. Hushed by Darwin’s theory, their primary role was simply to listen to the jazzy showmanship of the cocks and reward their chosen favourite, albeit reluctantly, with sex. Any female songbirds caught singing were written off as babbling freaks. Their calls fell on deaf scientific ears and were brushed aside with all too familiar excuses; female vocalizations were the result of a ‘hormonal imbalance’ or, like the horns of an antelope, simply a non-adaptive by-product of shared genetic architecture with the male. ‘The accepted wisdom was if you hear a female sing, it’s a functionless aberration – an old female that has a bit too much testosterone in her system,’ Naomi Langmore, professor of evolutionary ecology at the Australian National University, told me. ‘The textbook definition of birdsong is that it’s “complex vocalizations by male birds during the breeding season”. So it’s actually defined as a male vocalization.’