There have been fewer golden orioles in my garden in France this year: or perhaps, more accurately, I should say that I have heard fewer of them. Their single, slightly melancholy or plaintive whistling cry (one could hardly call it a song) has been much less evident than last year above the chirping chorus of the cicadas. It is difficult to see golden orioles, despite the brilliant yellow plumage of the males, for they are shy birds, and are much more manifest by sound than by sight. It is possible that it had been too hot for them this year to expend their energy on making a noise, though whether orioles are affected in this way by unusual excessive heat I do not know.
The golden oriole is very rare in the British Isles, where it used to breed; but Britain has become one of the most impoverished countries in the world from the point of view of wildlife (except of the human variety). It is curious in a way: Deindustrialization has not been accompanied by the extension of natural habitat, the population having grown and requiring ever more shopping centres, distribution warehouses, car parks, airports and amusement theme-parks, to say nothing of windfarms and solar panelling.
Elsewhere in Europe, there is no shortage of orioles, though in France it is forbidden even to possess a dead one. In what used to be called the Levant, the oriole is regarded as something of a pest, being so numerous as to imperil fruit crops—though the depredations of orioles probably do not rate at present rate very highly on that region’s litany of woes.
The life cycle of the oriole is extraordinary. In the northern spring, it migrates from southern sub-Saharan Africa to Europe and Eurasia; in autumn, it makes the return journey. This return journey is always via the Eastern Mediterranean. It spends between two and three months a year in its migrations, thus rather more time in the air than the average long-haul airline pilot. Of course, they are not subject to quite the same administrative oversight, though organizations dedicated to the welfare of animals no doubt would like to limit the hours that they were permitted to fly, if they could.
What I puzzle over is how such a pattern of behaviour could have evolved. I am afraid my concept of evolution is very crude, deriving as it does from school biology about 60 years ago.
For example, there was the moth in the North of England that lived on the bark of trees, which started out light-coloured but became darker and darker as the industrial revolution covered the locality, including the trunks of trees, with soot. This made perfect evolutionary sense, or perfect enough that I could grasp it. It is obvious that a lighter-colored moth on a soot-covered tree trunk would be more visible to a predator than a darker-colored one; a chance mutation could thus easily result in darker-coloured offspring who would be at survival advantage by comparison with their lighter coloured brethren. Before long, all the moths of that species would be darker.
But this facile and easily comprehensible story seems not to cover the case of the golden oriole. The idea of a gradual change in conduct of the ancestors of the present generation of orioles is not quite as plausible (even supposing that the complex conduct of a species were genetically as easily changeable as the colour of a moth’s wing).
The explanation of the oriole’s migration is that climate change in some sense encouraged behavioural experimentation in an overcrowded field, where every species, or every member of every species, or every gene of every member of every species, struggled for survival, or immortality. When Europe became more habitable after the end of the Ice Age, certain creatures, among them Oriolus oriolus, discovered that there were now rich pickings to be had in the newly-fertile Europe between the months of May and August, and therefore that it made sense to make the journey.
Of course, evolutionists don’t like expressions as “discovered,” “struggled,” or “made sense,” for they impose upon the process of evolution a vocabulary of direction or guiding intelligence, though in fact what they are describing is a purely mechanical process.
The problem is this: If the proto-oriole went only a little bit north, rather than the whole hog, he or she would find him- or herself in very inhospitable regions indeed, the Sahel and the Sahara. If it were argued that in those days, the Sahel and the Sahara were not so inhospitable to orioles as they are now, the question then becomes why they should have continued northwards. Bear in mind that the migratory conduct of orioles (and not only orioles, of course), is not a matter of conscious or rational reflection, but of hardwiring into their nervous systems. No oriole ever said to itself, “The Sahara’s a bit arid, let’s try it a little further north”—as sub-Saharan Africans do nowadays.
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This is not a diatribe against evolutionary theory. I have nothing better to offer to explain why the golden oriole flies back and forth between Africa and Europe; and all theories that propose an overall purpose, a design, to this extraordinary phenomenon, even if the role of the oriole in it that overall purpose is only very minor, a fly-on part in the drama as it were, seem to me open to at least equal objection.
But where explanation is concerned, Man dislikes a vacuum; he is an explanation-seeking animal. Where one is not immediately available, he invents one. That is one of the reasons that conspiracy theories are so popular and comforting: They give the illusion of understanding. Where there is understanding, there is also the possibility of mastery and control, especially by being nasty to someone, which for a good proportion of people is a pleasure, even a duty or a necessity. The situation is complicated by the fact that conspiracies do exist, and it is a moot question whether it is more dangerous to see them where they don’t exist, or not to see them where they do.
At any rate, I have no explanation of why there are fewer orioles this year, or why they come in the first place. On the other hand, it might be that the smaller number of orioles explains the larger, indeed very much larger, number of swallow-tailed butterflies this year, more of their caterpillars (a favorite food of orioles) having survived into the chrysalis and imago stages. There is, no doubt, an explanation of everything, but I do not have it.
