Harmony and Conflict in the Living World - Alexander F. Skutch [33]
Sex also influences social rank, but in no invariable fashion. In Budgerigars, or Shell Parakeets, females are dominant over males when they are not nesting; but while breeding is in progress, the males dominate their mates and are said to drive them back to their eggs when they attempt to leave. In the European Jay and the Canary, however, the situation is just the reverse: the male of a pair is dominant over his mate in the off season; but as nesting begins, she assumes the ascendancy (Shoemaker 1939). In some birds, such as the Jackdaws that Konrad Lorenz (1952) kept at Altenberg, the female, whatever her original rank, acquires that of the daw with whom she mates, so that a low-ranking female may suddenly find herself at the top if she wins the leading male. The diligent reader of history will doubtless recall parallel cases among people.
Some naturalists have contended that for successful coition the male must win dominance over the female, but this fallacy appears to result from the confusion of spatial position with personality or social standing. It would be as logical to maintain that the motorcar is dominant over the mechanic who crawls beneath to repair it. Not infrequently, as I have seen in woodpeckers and as has been reported in other birds, male and female alternately mount each
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other. Sometimes the male of a pair is the stronger character, sometimes the female; and I have watched many a pair of birds build and attend their nests without any indication that either lorded it over the other.
Dominance in a flock or herd confers several advantages. The dominant animal has the first choice of food; if the source is spatially limited, as at a feeding table for birds, it may eat first, while the others follow in the order of their rank. In times of scarcity, social standing may determine survival; the lowest-ranking individuals, pushed to the outskirts of the feeding flock, careful to avoid the pecks or nips of their superiors as well as watching out for predators, may not manage to eat enough to keep alive. Low social rank appears to be one of the reasons why the juveniles of certain birds, such as Wood Pigeons in England, suffer much higher winter mortality than their elders. Dominant birds can occupy the most coveted places in a communal roost; and among polygamous animals of all kinds, the high-ranking males most often win females.
On its own territory, a bird is usually dominant, no matter how low it may rank on neutral territorya fact that led Edwin Willis (1967) to define territory as "a space in which one animal or group generally dominates others which become dominant elsewhere." The farther from their own territory they wander in search of food, the lower a number of jays, titmice, thrushes, and other birds fall in social rank, or perhaps it would be more correct to say that they become more timid and submissive. Animals of nearly every kind feel more confident on their own home ground.
Although not absent from free animals in their natural environment, peck orders and similar manifestations of social rank are most conspicuous in domestic animals, animals in confinement, animals at feeding stations, and in other more or less artificial situations. In such situations social hierarchies have been chiefly studied. Certainly the kind of despotism that has been observed among penned chickens is rare among wild birds, which are free to go elsewhere if too greatly harassed by their companions in the flock.
In many social animals in their natural state, the high-ranking individual is not the despot but the leader, the vigilant guardian,
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the group protector occupying the post of danger, the peacemaker when disputes arise,