I’m in love with some chickens.  Sooty grouse are a pretty generic pheasanty-type bird.  I think a pheasant is a grouse if it spends most of its time being brown, but I could be wrong.  Chickeny overall look but with cryptic brown coloration (males get fancy in mating season) and no wacky head ornaments.  I believe chickens cluck to let each other know where they are in the underbrush; these guys made a soft woob woob noise instead.

The thing is, despite being game birds, these ones had no fear of people.  They weren’t as obviously hoping for treats as the canada jays, but might have been fed by some scofflaw in the past.  They walked in and out of plain sight, right next to the path – in snatching distance.  Their calls were sweet and their eyes big and cute.  It was a very nice encounter.

This was on a recent trip to Mt. Rainier, where we fucked up pretty badly at estimating our abilities, got wreck’d.  I kept saying “when you need it to have ended an hour ago but it’s still going.”  In the last couple miles we were basically being chased over the rough-hewn terrain by multiple species of mosquito.  They got our asses.  It was not worth it.

But it was almost worth it.  In addition to the sooty grouse family, we saw canada jays and two types of chipmunk, all close enough to get a pretty good look, and a lot of wildflowers and natural majesty – like looking at Rainier’s peak from the lower slopes.  The animals were close enough it was like being in a zoo without bars.  Oh, and we had to stop the car for an elk, which was a lot more impressive in size than the usual white-tailed deer.  But still…

I ain’t doing that again anytime soon.

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You ever find a young bird in a fallen nest, in some terrible place?  Like wtf were the parents thinking, to nest there?  Then you insist on taking it home, to save it, and your mom sez, “ya shouldn’t,” but you don’t listen, so… back yard funeral?  Classic experience.  My siblings and I did that shit circa 1985, I think.  House sparrow not-quite fledgling, just down on the sidewalk below a sheer forty foot ivy-strangled brick wall.

What nonsense location had the nest been?  In a snarl of ivy?  On the ledge where the crows and falcons could see it from a mile away?  Surely a stiff breeze was all it took.  Rock doves nest in some foolish spots, but I do think they have a better instinct for seeking shelter from wind, if nothing else.  I once saw a baby pigeon so close to the ground I could have snatched it.  Maybe one of these days when I’m ready to have a weirder pet.

But house sparrows.  That’s another species that does not belong here, very invasive in North America.  Unlike starlings, I don’t believe they’ve invaded wild environments too badly, maintaining their population among human structures.  I’ll accept that.  Probably less of a problem for this part of the world than white people.  I understand they’re not doing so well in the old world, and wonder what ridiculous invaders could be messing up their homelands.  House finches from California?  Mynahs?  Grey squirrels?  Shit has gotten pretty jacked up.

I did a mixed media four panel set of bird portraits, and I believe the only one that sold was the sparrow.  A hot thirty-five bucks for me.  Woo.  Selling art is some bullshit.

I really don’t have much to say about house sparrows.  They’re The Sparrow that ya boy Karl of Linne had in mind when he named the passerines.  Iconic in their drabness.  “His eye is on the sparrow” is supposed to be cool not because sparrows are smol and he protects the weak, but because nobody gives a shit about a sparrow, so he’s loving the unloved.  Right?  Anybody familiar with bullshitology wanna comment on that one?

I once saw a mother sparrow with like four juveniles chasing her around and begging for food, so I stopped to watch.  They looked exactly the same to my eye, except for behavior.  The juveniles lowered their bodies and cocked their heads back, made some kind of noise I no longer recall.  Such a scene is always funny and sad.  Those bums are harassing their poor mom until she manages to shake them off.  But that’s what remains of those tiny helpless creatures she cared for so deeply a few weeks ago – a gang of big jerks.  Flip that perspective.  Those jerks didn’t ask to be born.  They were thrust into existence filled with a howling need that could never be fulfilled, and never will be.  Hunger.  There once was warmth and a mouth that feeds, but the writing is on the wall.  You’re about to be on your own.

Humans and sparrows have altricial young.  They are helpless and bald and creepy, like me when I get too old to take care of myself lol.  But srsly, we have the same path through youth, from the cradle to the boot out the front door.  There are variations in the experience for us and for them.  Some humans have lifelong relationships with their parents.  Not so much with me.  Am I the sparrow that has me feeling poetic?

It’s as funny as it is sad, and the one quality ameliorates the other.  I’m not too bothered about it.  Just feels like something.  That’s all.

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Charly recently posted a kestrel pic from his very own home.  I once posted much shittier pics of a falcon on my front lawn.  That wasn’t a kestrel, but I have seen one before, at least once.  We have a different species in the US tho, the american kestrel.  They are smaller, which makes them cuter.  I don’t make the rules.  Sorry europe.

Most days I’m not seeing much nature.  Even when I go out of my way to see nature, it’s usually not much better than what I’d see in the mall parking lot.  The occasion when I saw the kestrel was very different.  I was on a birding trip with my dad and/or my brother; I don’t remember for sure who was there.  Paying more attention to birds than people, and an early leg of the journey had us by these marshy fields in southern Washington state.  They were so full of birds it felt like a strange dream.

Maybe my memory of the occasion is distorted.  By now it’s mostly a memory of a memory.  But in what I do retain, it’s delicious monster salad – creatures everywhere, feasting on nature’s goods.  Herons, egrets, a marsh harrier, surely some geese and ducks I don’t remember, red-winged blackbirds, corvids, and this little bird – sitting on a traffic sign.

There was a photo of a kestrel that did the rounds on social media briefly several years ago, where it was holding a grasshopper like a foot-long sub sandwich.  People wondered after the beast.  Its eyes were so huge, its beak so small, just a cartoon of a bird of prey.  Unlike every hawk or eagle I can think of, male american kestrels have some blue feathers.  Their patterning is very bold, despite being rendered in desaturate primary colors plus black and white.  Incidentally, that’s one of my favorite palettes.  My personal website used to have much the same color selection.

This is the part of the article where I use something about the bird’s name or description as a springboard for talking some unrelated rubbish… no, I won’t be doing that tonight.  I wake up for work in a lil over eight hours.  No way I get a full eight tonight.  I’ll do my best just the same…

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

I’ve surely seen these before, in a zoo collection filling out a mixed flock of more exotic poultry.  The common pheasant is what you think of when you hear “pheasant” – green head, white ring neck, weird red lappets on the face around their eyes, spots and stripes in a motley of earth tones, long sweeping tail.  That’s the male, females more drab as usual.  I don’t remember a specific instance of seeing them alive.  They’re not from here, introduced as they were around the world.  There’s a different introduced species of fowl one sees far more often, despite it being more showy and likely having smaller numbers globally: peafowl.

Pheasants were put on this continent to shoot.  Whatever, colonizers.  Now they’re here, out in fields, doing whatever it is that a chickenish wild creature does.  I can only remember seeing them in the wild one time.  It was some kind of game farm, or game farm adjacent plot of land where the unwise go to look at birds.  On the way in, we passed a ditch with a pile of dead birds, submerged in yellowish murky water.

At first I thought they were hawks.  It was hard to make out individual details, but they were stripey and not too small.  My brother was with me and considered calling the authorities – killing hawks is not allowed, right?  But we figured it out.  Shot for the sake of shooting, and left to rot.

I don’t get the pleasure of killing.  Seems like the behavior of sick creeps.  One might point out that predatory animals get a pass, right?  It’s how they live.  Alright, but their behavior does little to dissuade me from the idea that hunters are sick creeps.  The most intelligent predatory animals are legendary for their cruelty – for playing with their food.  Cannibalism, particularly of cubs, is widespread within Carnivora.

The conduct of white hunters in particular is doing their reputation no favors.  Every time you look up a hoofed animal no matter how tiny, meatless, or rare, you will see a white man posing next to a dead one.  I swear, I saw a pic of a mouse deer where the proud hunter was posing over it with the tiny peashooter he had used.  Famous politicians who hunt have also been puppy murderers, or blast from helicopters, or use assault rifles.  Losers.  Get a spear and put your ass on the line like a real hunter.

But I do eat meat, and when the soup goes down, you will see me hunting as well.  You will not see me making a game of it or smiling.  I guess it’s no big deal if it ain’t endangered species.  You’re not doing anything a dog wouldn’t do, and we’re all supposed to like dogs, right?  Fine.  I’m not going to say no.  Especially since you assholes killed all the wolves and somebody has to keep the deer numbers down.

But pheasants.  They look alright.  And they probably taste like chicken.

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You thought this was gonna be an original article?  Psych!  It’s a repost of one of my old hits, which happened to be about this bird.  If you wanna read the original comment section, check here.  Since the time of this post, I’ve seen adult brown-headed cowbirds at least once, and seen another juvenile creeping solo around the periphery of Federal Way’s Town Square Park.  Now to the cheap shit…

I’m about to do a lot of talking out my ass on subjects I’m not certified to comment on, but what I’m about to say feels true to me, so … good enough for now.  Just don’t cite me in your term paper.

Today I saw a juvenile brown-headed cowbird being fed by a dark-eyed junco, the first time I have ever witnessed an act of brood parasitism.  I crossed the street to get a better look.  The most famous brood parasite is the cuckoo, whose creepy behavior has been folded into a number of human languages to represent male sexual paranoia derived from the attitude that women and children are more important as property than as people.  This includes the word “cuck,” beloved of internet racists and misogynists, though their memetic use of the word has outstripped any sense of meaning.

I’m not here to talk about that.  I’m talking about birds that destroy the eggs of other birds, leaving their own offspring to be raised by parents of a different species.  Birds that engage in brood parasitism are typically larger than the species they use, meaning that raising the changeling bird is more demanding and potentially dangerous than raising a member of the bird’s own species.  The brown-headed cowbird I saw was larger than its deceitfully adopted parent, a junco that seemed small and skinny as it went about its work.

How is a bird fooled into raising a child that doesn’t even look right?  Depriving itself to feed a monster twice its mass?  It’s like a sheep raising a calf.  A lot of birds just aren’t very smart, have to rely on pure instinct to drive them, and other birds can exploit that.  Even the brood parasites themselves aren’t necessarily clever.  They just happened into that niche a million years ago and it worked, to the point brown-headed cowbirds wouldn’t know how to raise a baby if they were in a position to do so.

Instinct is a weird beast.  People like to say humans have instincts that drive us and take the concept too far.  Yes, we have instincts, but they aren’t necessarily the ones people talk about, certainly the average evopsych tool.  The main instinct I see in people around me is social sorting.  We try to understand and control our relationships with the people around us reductively, drawing in and out groups, choosing arbitrary or socially promulgated ways of discriminating against others.  It can be turned back on ourselves.  When abused as small children or changed by life circumstance to a kind of person we have previously learned to hate, we sometimes socially sort ourselves as “unlovable” and hide away.

Instincts for non-human animals are much more obvious, and without as much ability to teach each other how to act socially, their instincts often have to be wildly specific.  Take cats’ burial of feces.  You do not have to train a cat to use a litter box.  Some cats may have dysfunction that needs to be sorted out, but most kittens will quickly figure out how to use a litter box.  Why?

Here is the instinct, in the cat’s mind:  “I have to relieve myself.  Ugh.  It feels right to do this on a surface that gives beneath my paws.  Ah, this dirt is just right.  Now I can go.  Holy crap!  This smell is terrible!  For some reason, I feel a tinge of mortal fear.  I want to wave my paw next to it.  Oh, that’s moving dirt.  Will scratching the dirt make the smell go away?  If yes, sigh of relief, carry on.  If no, RUN AWAY!”  Some people don’t know about the last part.  It’s hilarious to watch your cats tear ass across the house to get away from their mess, when burying isn’t enough.

Humans have almost nothing like this weird chain of highly specific inborn feelings, because we gained the trait of culture.  We can teach each other to wash our food, to bury our feces, and so on.  Practically anything necessary can be taught instead of relying on instinct alone.  Unfortunately for birds, they aren’t as bright as us.  They have to rely on feelings.

The instinct, in the bird’s mind:  “I got laid.  Woo!  Now I’ve got some other weird feelings setting in.  Better make a nest.  Unggh!  Eggs.  Better sit on these.”  The brood parasite slips in here, knocking eggs out of the nest and laying its own.  The victim of this sheisty move returns to find its eggs different.  (Some birds actually recognize the switch through various means and knock the cuckoo eggs off, try to start over.)  Apparently a lot of birds, even if they recognize the change, don’t know what to do with that, and just carry on.  “Sit on weird eggs.  Baby hatch.  Feed that thing!”

This is the tragic romance.  The finagled parent is operating on the closest thing a bird has to love.  It is selflessly giving up its food, seeking more and more, doing its best to keep this baby alive and well.  A brood parasite baby is even more demanding than its natural child would have been, potentially making the parent wreck itself with hunger and exertion in the process.  But the parent is driven to harm itself like that, for the love of this strange monster.  It’s beautiful and sad, it’s no kind of way to be.  If your human relationships involve giving until you are broken, reevaluate them.  A tragic romance is something to behold, not something to live.

Well, that went around the world, and I have no snappy way to end it.  Have a song.

*the video I’d originally embedded disappeared
and this was the least worst replacement

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Starting with my first trip to that shady zoo in Kansas, I started seeing grackles whenever I went down to the area.  Not constantly, not on every fencepost, but pretty common.  While I’m certain some were regular type and some were boat-tailed, because I saw them in quick succession at the zoo, I couldn’t be 100% on that this long after the fact.  Like if I met a kinda taily regular grackle I’d be like, is this a boat tail?  And if I saw a boat tailed non-boating I’d be, well, clearly this is regular flavor grackle.

My favorite was at a gas station in the middle of nowhere, just a single boat-tailed grackle hopping around and looking for crumbs like a brewer’s blackbird would around here.  They’re more leggy, more beaky, more funny looking.  They just look like a fun bird.  I’d love to have them around, but I’ll wait until global warming pushes them into Western Washington.  Fuck going anywhere near that heat again.

While I don’t have much experience with them or much to say about them, I’m sure anybody from the US Midwest to Southwest could say lots.  I open the floor to that…

This is too short.  What can I say that is grackle adjacent?  Good bird name.  It’s a crackle or a cackle, coming from the grass or the green.  I suppose they’re named for the sound they make, like cats being called “mao” in China.  I’m gonna name animals after what they sound like to me and start calling dogs “fucks.”  Migratory thrushes can be called eeoo-eeoos.  Sad chickadees can be called umpeewees.  When my husband was a wee child he called crows awk-birds.

Bring the noise.  It’s onomatopoeia time.

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There’s a zoo in Kansas called Tanganyika Wildlife Park, and the fact it doesn’t have zoo in the name makes me wonder if they’re dodging regulation, like how cheese-themed products with no actual cheese in them are named Chezz Product™ or Chedze Matter©.  When my bro lived in KS he took us there.  His daughter was too high speed for our old asses and grabbed a snake by the tail.  Fortunately no harm no foul.  I fed a craisin® to a lemur and a big leaf to a giraffe.  Giraffe heads impressed me with their size the first time I did it, less so the second, altho maybe I was just disoriented by the heat and not really living in the moment.

The first time I went I remember noting there was an absurd variety of US-flavored “blackbirds,” aka icterids.  I saw grackles, boat-tailed grackles, brown-headed cowbirds, red-winged blackbirds, brewer’s blackbirds … unless my memory fails me on any of those particulars.  It’s been a minute.  But one that I can’t forget is from the second (and surely last) time I went:  yellow-headed blackbirds.

Yellow-headed blackbirds are not the most amazing thing going.  Cardinals are probably more fancy looking, with the crest and the sharp designs.  Still, that is some muffuckin’ bright yellow on their heads.  They look like a generic enough american blackbird, like an RWBB maybe, who traded in its red wing flash for a neon yellow football helmet.  The black and yellow is such a powerful and pleasing contrast, like bumblebee fuzz, it’s very appealing.

We saw a small flock in a short sparse tree near an animal enclosure, and my bro rushed to get a blurry pic or two.  Life list for both of us, and I doubt either of us will ever see them again.  Not sure the usual habitat and ways of these beasts, but they liked the sheisty zoo full of oversized ungulates.  I hope they’re still enjoying life in their way, wherever they may roam.

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What does it mean to you, birdies, to run in a mixed flock?  What are you getting out of it?  Who are these other birds, to you?  I’ve seen pics of caracaras that get a black vulture buddy.  Similar sized birds of prey that look extremely different from each other.  Caracaras have a rep for being smarter than the average raptor, and maybe that includes an unusual amount of social flexibility?  Then there’s escaped budgies flying with the starlings…  It’s intriguing.

Less remarkable is when the birds look extremely similar, like when goldfinches fly with pine siskins, or are just a drab pair in general.  The first time I saw ruddy turnstones and surfbirds together, I assumed they were the male and female of the same species.  They were identical, save coloration.  I took some notes the old-fashioned way, may still have been using a flip-phone at the time, and remember one species had yellow-green legs like pencils, and the other had bright carrot orange legs.  Do I remember anything else about their appearances, in shades of brown black and white like 99% of other shorebirds?  Not at all.  I remembered them long enough to make the ID and then lost the memory.

We had gone to Ocean Shores on the Pacific coast of Washington state around the time of my birthday.  I got a fat chocolate cake which felt pretty cool.  That was the occasion when I saw brown pelicans looking like pterosaurs, saw their long skinny wing feathers amid the kelp on the shore.  There was a spit, a kind of rock wall heading out into the water, and on that spit I saw a bunch of shorebirds flying from spot to spot, gleaning food from the rocks.  Shorebirds can be very hard to see in field environments or at distance, because their coloration is effectively cryptic.  Bold black and white head markings break up shape, skinny legs are like blades of grass.  These guys were highly visible on the rocks, some with black and white markings kinda bold under the wings in flight.  So I crawled out there and got a closer look, which was a good time for me.

Sometimes a post will make me think of a song, and I link the yewchoob video for it.  The only ones that jumped out at me were Queen’s “Friends Will Be Friends” and Dionne Warwick’s “That’s What Friends Are For,” and I low-key hate both of those songs (as much as i <3 4eva other things on the Highlander soundtrack).  I often suggest topics of discussion and people seldom bite, but here goes: What unusual animal friendships have you witnessed?

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The pileated woodpecker is the largest woodpecker left in North America, not quite the largest remaining species in the world.  They aren’t especially rare, which is nice.  I’ve only ever seen them from down on the ground, while they were high in a treetop, or on a power line or utility pole.  I’ve heard the call a few times.  It doesn’t sound like Woody Woodpecker at all.  I’ve been lied to!

Woodpeckers are in a freaky offshoot of birdkind called Piciformes, which includes some guys you might not expect, such as toucans.  The tell is in the feet.  They have two front facing and two rear facing toes, allowing them to cling to the verticals of tree trunks more effectively.  OK, they are far from the only birds that do this -see parrots- but they do all have this trait in common.  Parrots are more closely related to falcons and songbirds than to woodpeckers, so this is a case of convergent evolution in funky feet.

It’s pretty cool that tha king of woodpeckin’ is so easy to find.  I’d like a better look at them, but the cost is costly.  My bipolar pater went big into birdfeeding, with specialized lures for the big boys, and was rewarded with some good looks at them, some photographs to commemorate it.  By the time he successfully brought them to the patio, neighbors were getting angry about the bird shit and noise.  It was one of the camelborne straws that caused him to lose that place, always trading down for something worse.

Who’s seen the pileated woodpecker, and did it cause you any trouble?

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