Is living in sin or being a lesbian an Amazing Thing? I think so, if you’re a Greylag goose or a Roseate tern:



I don’t know the precise word for what Greylags do; polyandry usually means that the female mates with both males, which isn’t the case here. And I’m a bit puzzled by the narrator’s comment at the very end of the clip that researchers who want to avoid controversy should avoid the topic. Maybe that was a segue into the next bit of the documentary; at any rate, it’s sad that lingering ignorance of the is-ought distinction drags down what ought to be objective research. We see that homosexuality is a benefit to Greylag goslings, and not so much for tern chicks. But so what? None of that knowledge necessarily translates to information about humans (who, as a general rule, don’t have to worry in their youth about learning to plunge-dive for fish or getting picked off by hawks). Moreover, even if it did, we presumably want as much objective information as possible to inform our decisions about morality and social policy, don’t we?

Tags: Birds, Saturday Birds