The song is about cheating on your significant other.Now, around the time that this song was in heavy rotation,biologists were in deep discussion about whether bird species,notably songbirds and waterfowl were actually monogamous or not.See, for decades, generations of science students were taught that well over 90 percent of the bird species were monogamous.A male and female mating faithfully for life.That was until the late 1980s, when a new laboratory technique came on the scene,which could copy DNA from a small tissue or fluid sample and decode the genetics of individuals.Now, before that technique, we were never ever certain about, 100 percent,who the parents of baby birds were. All we had were our field notes.And we would know which adults lived in a nest and which ones fed the baby birds.Well, come to find out, study after study kept coming in and we found so much evidence of infidelityamong bird species, particularly these songbirds that we thought were the pinnacle of monogamy.It would have made Maury Povich jealous for the ratings.It rocked biology and ornithology so hard, we had to modify and expand the entire definition of monogamy.
