In 1853 the Reverend Frederick Morris, an opponent of Charles Darwin's and a man with a Victorian sense of propriety, urged his parishioners to emulate the fidelity of a small bird called the dunnock. Be thou like the dunnock, he told them - the female and the male impeccably faithful to each other.

What would the Rev. Morris have made of the scandalous truth? Far from being monogamous, the dunnocks, from a Victorian point of view, have shockingly lax morals. The female dunnock often takes not one but two males as partners. The best a stern man of religion could say about dunnocks is that there's no superfluous bump and grind when they mate - it's strictly fertilisation business, over in 0.1 seconds. Fast enough to do it while your mother's back is turned.

LRB 16 November 2000 | PDF Download