John Burroughs Quotes

I am not going to speculate about the emotions that might be involved in avian infidelity.

There are so many spiders, and their rituals, their mating rituals, their courtship ritual, can be very, very different.

The Ruffed Pandanga of Borneo and Rotherham spreads out his feathers in his courtship dance and imitates Winston Churchill and Tommy Cooper on one leg. The padanga is dying out because the female padanga doesn't take it too seriously.

Males transmit signals in courtship through behavioral displays.

The juke joint, the honky tonk, and the ballroom also represent one more thing, anthropologically speaking: a ceremonial context for the male-with-female-duet dance flirtation and embrace, upon which the zoological survival of the human species has always been predicated.

As a boy, I had two small aquaria in our backyard in which I watched, each spring, the nest building and other fascinating behaviours of sticklebacks.

I don't know if it's animalistic or what, but men become like peacocks with their feathers up when women are around.

The lark that shuns on lofty boughs to build, Her humble nest, lies silent in the field.

Plumage features constitute a major component of courtship signals.

In courtship, who wins and who loses will determine who passes on their DNA to tomorrow.

Some tribes of birds will relieve and rear up the young and helpless, of their own and other tribes, when abandoned.

It may be the cock that crows, but it is the hen that lays the eggs.

Both sexes like the exercise and challenge of sports, but for men it's also a basic display behavior for impressing and winning a mate.

The art of the bird is to conceal its nest both as to position and as to material, but now and then it is betrayed into weaving into its structure showy and bizarre bits of this or that, which give its secret away and which seem to violate all the traditions of its kind.

Animals use a broad range of strategies to advertise themselves in the mating market. In some instances, visual cues highlight a morphological feature - for example, the peacock's tail.

Courtship, properly understood, is the process whereby both the male and the female are brought into that state of sexual tumescence which is a more or less necessary condition for sexual intercourse. The play of courtship cannot, therefore, be considered to be definitely brought to an end by the ceremony of marriage; it may more properly be regarded as the natural preliminary to every act of coitus.

It makes you realize how basically everything we do comes down to a) mating or b) competing for resources. It’s just like Animal Planet, only we’ve got Cover Girl and Victoria’s Secret instead of colored feathers and fancy markings, and the violence occurs at the Nordstrom’s Half-Yearly Sale.

The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.

We all have a sense of level. It may not be based on class exactly anymore, but we still have a sense of what we're entitled to. People pick partners who are nearly their equal in looks. The pretty marry the pretty, the ugly the ugly. To the detriment of the breed.

Penguins mate for life. Which doesn't really surprise me, because they all look exactly alike. It's not like they're gonna meet a better-looking penguin someday.

Men give the same lines to different women for the same reason women wear the same perfume for different men; we all try the things that work.

With mammals the male appears to win the female much more through the law of battle than through the display of his charms.

I think we need to have a nest of something which is family.

By going and coming, a bird weaves its nest.