Excerpt from page 223 of Matt Ridley's book THE RED QUEEN
..." Nordic forests seem to be full of deceitful adulterers... some male pied flycatchers in the forest of Scandinavia manage to be polygamous by holding two territories, each with a female in it... Two teams of researchers have studied the birds and come to different conclusions about what is going on. The Finns and the Swedes say that the mistress is deceived into believing the male is unmarried. The Norwegians say that since the wife sometimes visits the mistress's nest and may try to drive her away; the mistress can be under no illusions. She accepts the fact that her mate may desert her for his wife but hopes that if things go wrong at the wife's next - they often do - he will come back to help her raise her young. He gets away with it only when the two territories are so far apart that the wife cannot visit the mistress's territory often enough to persecute her. In other words, according to the Norwegians, men deceive their wives about their affairs, but not their mistresses.
..." Nordic forests seem to be full of deceitful adulterers... some male pied flycatchers in the forest of Scandinavia manage to be polygamous by holding two territories, each with a female in it... Two teams of researchers have studied the birds and come to different conclusions about what is going on. The Finns and the Swedes say that the mistress is deceived into believing the male is unmarried. The Norwegians say that since the wife sometimes visits the mistress's nest and may try to drive her away; the mistress can be under no illusions. She accepts the fact that her mate may desert her for his wife but hopes that if things go wrong at the wife's next - they often do - he will come back to help her raise her young. He gets away with it only when the two territories are so far apart that the wife cannot visit the mistress's territory often enough to persecute her. In other words, according to the Norwegians, men deceive their wives about their affairs, but not their mistresses.
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