My statement, offered mostly in jest, that I would return to Vermont in April when the smart red-winged blackbirds returned, not in March when the dumb ones arrived, brought to mind an interview I did in 1999 of biologist Gordon Orions, recognized as a preeminent expert on these incredible marsh dwellers. Whenever I hear the first of them singing at the top of their lungs in the early spring, it brings back memories of being seven years old in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and spending time in a marsh. I built a raft out of a concoction of tree branches, old cans, scrap wood — anything that might float. I’d pole out into the middle of the swamp, the raft gradually sinking, the water climbing until it reached just below the top of my rubber boots. Then I’d turn around, a cacophony of red-winged blackbirds trilling all around me. I kept thinking I could modify that raft so that it floated. Inevitably, I’d return home with at least one soaker.

As far as the early red-winged blackbirds go, they are the young males seeking the best territory, which ultimately means mating with the healthiest young females. The females arrive later, with the improved weather. A substantial portion of the young males perish in the process, but those that do survive — the strongest and most resistant to cold — get the choice females. The older, more mature, wiser survivors, the ones who somehow survived a prior attempt at the early arrival strategy, pass up those “best” females in the interests of longevity. They simply aren’t worth the discomfort or the risk.

Professor Gordon Orions, now retired, was a Distinguished Professor of the Zoology Department of the University of Washington. I interviewed him in Seattle. He talked about his research into the territorial habits of red-winged blackbirds, and about his work on the role of beauty in human evolution.

In red-winged blackbirds, there is a surplus population, a big floater population. There are many more males wanting territories than there are territories available. If you don’t get a territory, you don’t get a mate; if you get a good territory, you get a harem. So when a male gets a territory, he spends a lot of time defending it.

The general rule is that the male that has a territory keeps the territory for the season. We did removal experiments where we took a male off his territory, held him in a cage, and then after a new male moved in, we let the first owner go. We discovered that if we let the first owner out after two days, he almost always got his territory back. The second owner would probe a little, and then retreat. But if we waited four or five days, the previous owner got his territory back only about half the time. That is when you really get the fights. After seven days, the second territory holder almost always wins. It appears that after that length of time he knows the territory well and has a vested interest. After you have some reproduction going on, and your kids are there, the value to you skyrockets.

We also did double-removal experiments. We removed the male, then, four or five days later, removed the second male that came in. After two or three more days, we released the first male from captivity. At that point, the guy he faces has had the territory only two days. The first male almost always got his territory back.

In the single removal, the first guy has been off for seven days, and the new owner been on for seven days. They are perfectly correlated. The first male loses weight in the cage. Maybe they are not as good fighters anymore. When you take the second bird off after five days, and you release the first bird after seven days, and he almost always beats the bird who has been on there two days, you know that the first bird is winning back the territory because it means more to him. Conditioning seems to be a secondary factor.

The female has to choose a habitat and a male. They tend to come as a package. As it turns out, there is a lot of extra-pair copulation. Like most small birds, red-winged blackbirds copulate every day. Females seek copulations with males outside the territory on which they are nesting. When we tested the genetic parentage of chicks, we found that roughly a third of all chicks were fathered by a male other than the owner of the territory.

The interesting thing is what happens if there is a predator at the nest. Males will come in from several territories and mob to try to drive the predator off. The males who will be most aggressive in defending the threatened nest will be the males who have copulated with that female. So there are subtle things going on. They are birds, but they are not simple-minded about the things that matter. About things that have to do with survival and reproductive success they are amazingly sophisticated. I get a lot of pleasure out of seeing ourselves as creatures who have evolved out of the same scheme. As Darwin said, there is a grandeur in how things work in nature.

 I asked Professor Orions about his definition of beauty:

 As an evolutionary biologist, my working assumption is that if something evokes a lot of emotion, it has to do with survivorship and reproduction success. We evolved to like to be in places that are good for us.

My wife and I spent some time in East Africa, where humans are believed to have originated. We went to places that had a lot of resources, that would have been good places to live. We looked at the characteristics of tree shapes, and spacing of trees in those environments. We developed from that a theory of what a particularly attractive tree shape might be. And then we tested that in a number of ways. One by using photographs, and getting people to respond to tree shapes. And varying the tree shapes in various ways in terms of how thin or broad they are, how close to the ground the branches are, the canopy, how close together they grow. Across different cultures, people raised in different environments, you can demonstrate a strong preference for a tree shape that branches very soon from the ground. A broad crown. Relatively open, rather than a tall central trunk. That of course is the tree shape that characterizes the most productive African savannahs where we think humans got started. There is another dimension to that -- those trees are really easy to climb when you are being chased by a lion or a rhino.

To the extent that I try to define beauty precisely, I try to define it operationally. We have feelings of beauty with respect to visual and auditory stimuli. A beautiful song. Beautiful odors. I see a sense of beauty as fundamentally a very positive emotional response to some configuration of some sensory mode. Beyond that, I don’t try to go, except that I am exploring the degree to which beauty is more than just in the mind of the beholder. Some people say you can’t account for beauty. I am really trying to see to what degree you can account for it in general terms.

            I worked with a psychologist, and developed a three-part theory of habitat selection. And that led into studies of landscape painting, assuming that a landscape painting represents an environment that you haven’t been in before. Presumably the painter wishes to sell the painting, and therefore wants to paint something you would like to look at.

So we did a lot of analyses of landscape painting. We gathered a lot of information on sketches versus final paintings. The final painting is rarely what the artist really saw. It has been fun to see the commonalties in modifications that artists make – the common features in landscape painting that appear over and over again, that are designed to lure you in. Make you want to explore. We found that paintings contain images of places that you want to get to. A destination, in which you are going to be safe, and have a terrific view. This idea, the prospect refuge theory, developed by a British geographer, was the stimulus for a lot of what we did. We found that artists structure paintings to provide access to this place. If there are barriers in there like water, in the final painting there will be a row boat or a bridge -- something to get you there. It’s accessible. Enticing. By comparing the sketches with the final, we’ve been able to see how the painter enhances that.  They make more out of those access features than was really there. That has been sort of interesting. To see those patterns emerging.

Positive aesthetic responses, of which beauty is one, lead us to select places to live that evoke those responses. It seems that the places we select are the places that are better at providing resources. People who don’t like to eat, are not among our ancestors, just as people who don’t like sex, are underrepresented among our ancestors.

A couple of days later, at the Whidbey Institute, I met David Abram author of  Spell of the Sensuous and explored the same subject. David’s book is regarded by many to be a classic of natural history and our relationship with wild nature.   

“There is something about the experience of being inside the world, being radically imbedded or situated in the depths of the blooming, buzzing field of life. Really immersed in its depths. That’s what it is about for me. The culture, the civilization, into which I was born keeps tearing me away from the mystery, keeps forcing me ponder the world, or to calculate as though I were outside of it. The science that I read keeps trying to convince me that we are able to figure out the world. Which to me is ludicrous.

“Can one put something like beauty in a totally logical frame? No. Beauty is too big for us to ever figure out. Logic itself, and the logic that we might apply to come up with an understanding or explanation of beauty, that logic has been created out of beauty.

“Beauty drives evolution. Moves evolution. It is the motivation underlying survival, underlying reproduction. Why does life seek to perpetuate itself, if not because it is enjoying being alive? What is that enjoyment about? It is the deliciousness of experience. It is beauty. Beauty drives evolution from the smallest, simplest, single-celled entity, up to us. Beauty was there prior to any explanation we can provide.

“Beauty is so deeply linked to eros, that impulse that drives and motivates and draws, that keeps pulling life out of itself to keep shifting and shape-shifting into ever new forms. And what is eros if not that pleasure and astonishment with that which is not oneself? So logic, rational logical reasoning, can never fully explain beauty, because beauty is the larger context. Beauty is that what ultimately explains logic.”