Coos Without Bows

Must the male ring dove bow when he coos while courting? And who cares? The answer to the first question is a qualified no. And one who cares is Joshua Wallman. the 17-year-old son of a Manhattan real estate man, whose interest in ring doves last week won him the top Westinghouse Science Scholarship, which is worth $7,500 in money and a great deal more in prestige.

An owlish youngster, Josh Wallman has always been fond of birds. A lifelong owner of canaries and parakeets, he started going to the Natural Science Center of Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History at about eleven, soon became an unpaid, unofficial "helper" there. During his sophomore year at the Bronx High School of Science, he studied the waterproofing of birds' feathers, earned a regional award from the Future Scientists of America Foundation. Winning the eye of Dr. Daniel S. Lehrman of the Rutgers University Institute of Animal Behavior, Josh was taken on during summer vacations as a laboratory assistant.

With Lehrman's encouragement, Josh studied the ring dove, a small, brownish bird found only under domestication. A point of note about the male ring dove is that he inflates his esophagus (gullet) and bows when making his cooing sound before target females. Experts on animal behavior have assumed that the courting actions are all part of a single instinctive pattern fixed within the brain. When such a pattern is released, it must go through its full course--in this case, throat swelling, cooing and bowing.

To test the theory, Josh operated on male doves, inserting small tubes in their gullets to let the air out. Then he made motion pictures and sound recordings of their courting behavior. The birds could still coo rather hoarsely, but they could not inflate their gullets, and they did not complete the courting pattern by bowing to the females. This, explains Josh, indicates that the pattern does not come as a unit from the bird's brain but can be cut short by an external influence.

The importance of it all? Says Junior Scientist Wallman: "The results are interesting in terms of elucidation of ritualized behavior patterns."

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