Fidelio

Sing up, dear THE lovey-dovey monogamy which the untutored eye may perceive in pairs of songbirds, raising their young together in nests constructed by joint endeavour, has long been exposed by zoologists as a fantasy. Even by the adulterous standards of the ornithological world, though, the red-backed fairy-wren, an Australian bird, is a champion. According to a study just published in Biology Letters by Daniel Baldassarre of Cornell University and his colleagues, almost half of fairy-wren nest...