“This is my happy place,” she says.īirds, she thought at the time, didn’t have penises. Holyoke College in Massachusetts in September 2021. Then she had another thought: “Man, is that a penis?”īrennan dissects a female coachwhip snake in her lab at Mt. “What the hell is that thing?” she remembers thinking. When he finally detached, she saw something dangling off him-something long, white and curly. The whole event takes seconds.īut this time, the pair began waddling around, glued together. Brennan simply refers to it as the vagina, since it performs all the same functions and then some.) They briefly rub genitals together in an act known as a “cloacal kiss,” in which the male transfers sperm into the female. (Biologists usually call this orifice a cloaca, which means “sewer” or “drain” in Latin. That’s because they don’t have external genitalia, just a multipurpose opening under the tail used to expel waste, lay eggs and have sex. Brennan will never forget what happened next.įor most birds, mating is an artless affair. As Brennan watched through her binoculars, the male clambered clumsily onto her back. Finally she crouched down with her tail in the air, inviting him to mount. She ran up to him, backed away, then chased him again. As she held her breath, a female appeared from the dense underbrush. That’s when she heard it: a pure, whistling tone, with an undertone of sadness. “You could die in that forest, and there would be no trace of you in just a few months,” she recalls. It was stiflingly humid she was sweating through her protective gear. As always, the forest floor was dark and shadowy, the sunlight swallowed up by the upper canopy. It was a late summer afternoon in 2000, and the 28-year-old Colombian biologist was stalking her study animal, a squat gray-blue bird called the great tinamou in the dense Costa Rican rainforest. Her journey, in fact, began with a penis. Patricia Brennan never intended to become a champion of the vagina.
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