Birds.

These familiar, feathered, fellow Earthlings are often the subject of much adoration from humans, and most birds that enter our daily lives occupy a place of fondness in our hearts. When we think of birds, we imagine, before essentially anything else, their beauty. They are revered across scores of cultures for their complicated and uplifting songs, a trait that exists as the result of meticulous tuning and retouching by sexual selection. Their wind-blown arias range from the simple, structured trill of the western meadowlark, to the complicated, crystal clear chimes of the white-rumped shama, to whatever the hell this insanity is from the superb lyrebird. Many are also regarded physically beautiful, and are gifted with soft elegance in flight, and their frequently vivid feather pigments make them among the most colorful vertebrates outside of a handful of coral reef fish and perhaps poison dart frogs. We equate grace, tranquility, and majesty with birds of varying flavors. Peace with the dove, might and prowess with hawks and eagles….

…the sensation of receiving a prostate exam from Dr. Cactus Fingers…with the potoo

I mean, shit, in Abrahamic and Zoroastrian faith traditions, we even envision angels, the shimmering middle-men of the Creator, as having bird wings plastered on their backs. Lots of things have wings and fly (bats, flies, beetles, and R. Kelly for example) but no, it was the bird’s weird, fluffy, elongated arms that were selected to be associated with a supernatural being that, supposedly, is a distilled amalgamation of all things right in the world.

We also appreciate some species of birds for their intelligence and affection, as well as their impressive capacity for vocal mimicry (I’m looking at you, parrots and mynahs). Many groups of birds are startlingly clever, and corvids (the family to which crows, ravens, rooks, and jays belong) are by-and-large tool-using, highly social, unnervingly observant braniacs that exhibit complex puzzle-solving abilities that make your “whip smart” border collie look like an insipid, drooling dipshit, and are more akin to a ruthless contingent of droogs than to tweety birds.

When we aren’t putting their image on national flags, making our clothing out of their feathers, or pasting them on random knick knacks, we are eating them. Birds are a common source of protein the world over, and here in the States, we appreciate poultry so damned much, that we’ve invented a way to shove as many species of fowl as possible up each other’s asses in order to make a delightful Russian nesting doll of bird flesh. We love the taste of birds so much that we’ve managed to slaughter many species permanently into the past tense. Passenger pigeons used to blacken the skies of North America until European immigrants came along and gave them the good ol’ ‘buffalo treatment’ and straight up blasted them out of their volant swarms with as much pause and contemplation as we give the flipping of a light switch. Humans hunted the flightless red rail of Mauritius to extinction by capitalizing on the birds’ affinity for red-colored objects by pulling out red cloths to lure the poor animals in close…and then bludgeoning them into shrieking oblivion with large sticks.

So, we historically have had sort of a “love/love-to-death” relationship with feathered fauna. It is then, perhaps, not surprising that birds, despite all their charm, can also be somewhat of a nuisance…as some sort of karmic retaliation, I’m sure. A great deal of this comes from their incredibly badass pedigree. It’s important to remember that birds are dinosaurs. Literally. Not kinda, halfway, tangentially related to dinosaurs. Nowadays, the paleontological evidence strongly suggests they ARE therapod dinosaurs, through and through. It’s not so much that Polly is descended directly from T-Rex, but goddamnit if they aren’t kissin’ cousins (a reality that is unavoidably observable in this experiment that aesthetically transforms a lowly chicken into a sickle-toed raptor with ease). Every innocently chittering and whistling thrush and sparrow outside your window is a representative of the last remaining groups of dinosaurs (a clade of critters known as the Maniraptorans), the only group to emerge out the other side of the mass extinction that marked the end of the Cretaceous.

Even after their bigger, toothier relatives kicked the bucket, birds sort of took up the mantel of filling the “giant, menacing, everything-runs-away-from-me monster” niche. In South America, they reigned for tens of millions of years over their ecosystem in the form of flightless, knife-faced homicidal maniacs the size of Shaquille O’Neal (something I wrote briefly about here). One group, the pelagornids, or ‘pseudo-tooth’ birds, went retro and evolved spiky projections from their beaks that basically functioned like teeth. Up until relatively recently in New Zealand, massive, Tolkienesque eagles hunted even larger flightless birds (moas), and likely plucked off the first colonizing Maori like modern hawks take down field mice.

So, given their evolutionary legacy, perhaps it isn’t so shocking that birds, given the right conditions, can be, well, downright unpleasant. I’m a lover of birds (if not solely for the fact that they are, as far as we can tell, motherfucking dinosaurs are you kidding me), but even I can admit that they can be obnoxiously loud (the relentless cooing of the ubiquitous zebra doves on the Hawaiian island I live on is beginning to be an unwelcome wake up call) and foul tempered. Anyone who has spent any time around roosters or overly “friendly” swans knows this. Even as pets they can reek something awful, and then there’s the whole issue of birds shitting as much as your average Royal Caribbean patron. Birds are notorious for spreading disease to people and other animals, and can be agricultural pests as introduced/alien species. But, I suppose that might not be enough horror to transform your conceptualization of birds into that of enraged, dead-eyed, screeching, spray defecating, reptilian nightmares. Especially if your most negative associations with birds just come from getting caught underneath a pigeon releasing its bowel ballast, or from a frustrating bird and pipe-themed app game, which shall go unnamed…

“Up! Up, you stupid piece of shit!”

We know that birds easily have the capacity for bouts of aggression, towards each other, towards other birds, towards their prey, and towards humans. A certain proportion of it is simply overtly aggressive mating; there’s a good chance that whatever “language” mating vocalizations of many species are in, it doesn’t have a word for ‘consent.’ An endangered species of parrot from New Zealand, the kakapo, can be sexually aggressive; and by sexually aggressive, I mean it will mount and dry hump the back of a human’s head. Male dabbling ducks are down-to-their-core gang rapists that possess a shudder-inducingly brobdingnagian, thorny, spring-loaded death dick that looks like it slinky-ed its way out of Tim Burton’s most Freudian, repressed nightmares.

The sins of these dinosaurian, deceptively innocent beings are common and diverse. Obviously, birds-of-prey like hawks, falcons, owls, and eagles are the tigers and wolves of the sky, and rain death upon fuzzy, soft-bodied mammals and clueless reptiles the world over. Vultures chase off other birds from carcasses. Cuckoos are brood parasites that pass off the child-rearing chore onto small, ill-equipped songbirds…which inevitably leads to the slow, pathetic malnourishment of every other chick in the parasitized nest. Corvids routinely bully other birds just for shits and giggles. Just recently, a crow and a seagull (basically, the avian equivalents of a pipe-wrench-wielding Mob leg-breaker)  batterfanged the bejesus out of two hapless doves released by the Pope…to, hilariously, symbolize peace.

You might be aware that the cassowary, a flightless bird closely related to emus, native to northern Australia and Papua New Guinea, has a reputation as a violent animal…prone to defending itself against perceived threats with a casual leaping, roundhouse kick, armed with a razor claw-tipped foot (a behavior that has injured many, and resulted in a single recorded death).

But, the face of badassatry and biker gang ethics in birds isn’t as narrow as bitey swans, prank pulling ravens, and the occasional murderous cassowary. Birds take after their deadly, extinct, dinosaur brethren in more ways than you’d expect, and the reverberations of eons past can be picked up in behavioral and physical attributes across a very wide diversity of these marvelous animals.

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