Mating Season

Typing seems to be faster than handwriting, so this place on the internet seems to be the best place to journal my weird thoughts. Here is another:

It is spring. I ran this morning and enjoyed the cool air, wet pavement, green grass and bright daffodils. All signs of April in Pennsylvania.

Going past one well-manicured lawn, I saw a pair of cardinals zipping around: a red one chasing a brown one. The male has bright, crimson feathers & a fancy hat; the female is a modest, soft brown hue.

I've noticed that this is often the case in birds: the male is more visually attractive than the female. Girlie birdies are beautiful in their own ways, but the colorations on the males are specifically designed to attract the eye.

Consider: a red cardinal; a green-faced mallard; a blue-green peacock with magnificent tailfeathers. On the other hand, the female cardinal, the female duck, and the peahen are each a duller brown color.

This is less often true in mammals. Buck & doe rabbits look the same, dogs of the same breed look the same; porcupines, raccoons, coyotes have the same appearance between genders (except size, sometimes). Deer have the functional difference in that the bucks have antlers they use for fighting over the females. One case I can think of is that lions have great big manes, and lionesses do not.

So anyways, I was looking at these cardinals today and thinking about how (most often in birds, I guess) the male is the "pretty" one, using his physical appearance to attract a female mate. With people, it's quite the opposite: women are the beautiful ones. In societies where courtship is practiced, the men each seek out a beautiful woman and woo her.

Boy-birds woo their lady-birds with their looks, while men woo women because of their looks. I don't know if there's any theology/philosophy/biological reasoning behind that, but I've observed this a few times before, and I wonder why our Creator chose to give women beauty rather than men, while the reverse is true in the animal kingdom. (I'm open to anyone's thoughts or answers in this)