Now, it was so bad that this was the headline of the "New York Times" science section, August, 1990."Mating for Life? It's not for the Birds or the Bees." We had to come up with new definitions.The situation where an individual would change partners,either between breeding seasons or just simply because they didn't like their partner anymore?We now call this "serial monogamy." I didn't know it was going to be this funny.The situation where we know the male and female pair togetherand all the babies belong to both partners? We call that "genetic monogamy."And we now recognize that it only holds true for about 14 percent of the songbird species,which we were very certain were truly monogamous. And with this reclassification,we realized that in a lot of those field observations where we saw a male and female sharing a nest,comaintaining a territory, even provisioning offspring together,often included a few baby birds that did not belong to the male partner.We call this "social monogamy." And the mechanism responsible? Extra-pair copulation.
