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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There’s this idea some woodpeckers evolve to look similar to larger / more dominant woodpeckers that live in the same area, to take advantage of rep established by a tougher beast, without having to invest in the body size to get tougher themselves.  I proposed in another article that “oregon morph” dark-eyed juncos may be doing the same thing with spotted towhees.  (My idea will be studied by actual scientists when hell freezes over.)  The go-to example in this area is downy woodpeckers trying to look like hairy woodpeckers.

They look similar enough, how can I know which one I’ve seen?  The one I distinctly recall was seen at a very great distance, which is precisely where my sense of scale breaks down.  Can I be sure I could tell the difference between a woodpecker six inches long and one that’s eight inches long, from seventy feet away?  It just seemed like such a small bird, I have to think it was the smaller of the two.  I could very easily be wrong.

Where was this rare beauty?  Near the top of a tall scraggly tree amid concrete on concrete, the Federal Way Transit Center.  There was more appropriate habitat for it in parks and residential area around lakes not far at all, as the bird flies, but that’s not where I saw it.  They could look almost like any old songbird, with more sparrowish proportions than most other woodpeckers, but they’re all black and white, not especially cryptic, and they hang onto trees vertically, without the flattened posture of a creeper or nuthatch.

Not an amazingly exciting bird, but it’s nice to know they’re around.  And that’s not a bad gig, impersonating a more successful person to gain their social cachet.  If I got a toupee and wore foundation, I could kinda look like Matt Damon, hawk crypto on Superb Owl Sunday, make a bank full of funny money.  Watch out!

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Like Yurp, Amurrica has a coot.  A coot is part of a fucking weird group of weird birds, but is trying to pass itself off as something much more normal.  You see them on a pond and you might think, that’s kind of a duck, right?  It has some makeup on its forehead to indicate it’s an alien, like in Star Trek: The Next Generation, but it’s a duck.  Right?

No, those toes are not webbed.  Those toes are lobed.  Each segment of each toe has laterally projecting flaps that help them paddle almost as good as webbies.  I haven’t actually seen coots in a long time, and I’m not sure why.  Throughout my life I’ve always seen mallards at rivers and small lakes much more often than coots, but lately…  Probably it’s just a coincidence.

Many of their cousins like swamphens and gallinules have very weird proportions, more leggy with just hugely long toes.  “He feet too big for he gotdam body,” so sayeth the meme.  That makes coots the boring ones, and appropriately they are grey and black.  Puritan birds with white beaks and blood-red eyes.

Coot is an american slang term for elderly people.  Really, it’s a slur, but one of the gentler ones.  It calls to mind a person who is losing their cognitive function.  Even if said with affection, best to not.  If you’re not there yet, I don’t think you can imagine how threatening the specter of losing your cognitive function is – or the awareness that it is already happening.  Some people might roll with it, some might be saddened or upset, whether they show it or not.

I’ve been thinking off and on lately – more within the last year – that I’d like to start writing about old characters, perhaps exclusively.  Why should I fantasize about youth, think only of the beauty of the young, when that isn’t me and never will be again?  The majority of my life will be spent looking old and feeling old, with various forms of age-related infirmity guaranteed.  I’m already experiencing them.  I’m bald, my remaining hair has been mostly white for years, and my spine is degenerating.

I enjoyed writing characters close to my own age in Centennial Hills, Shammy and Eliza.  Why not make them the MCs?  Murder She Wroteiverse.  Diagnosis: Murderiverse.  Just as a trans person would not want every story to be about the struggle against transphobia, a senior would not want every story to showcase the difficulties of age.  But I do think that can highlight another area for representation: disability.  Once you get over sixty, it’s sooo common to have multiple disabilities of varying severity, it becomes normal.  Normalize everybody in your story being disabled.  Shit’s like that, but we still abide, still have the best lives we can, as much as we can.

On the other hand, maybe I’m not quite qualified to write about that yet.  Maybe I need to experience more of it.  Not quite fifty.  And of course, it’s a hard limit on the commercial viability of a project, much like making the MC transgender.  Heh, like I should even be giving a shit about that, at this point in life.

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Didja know most of the “canada geese” we see in Washington state are actually cackling geese, a smaller related species with fucken identical coloration?  There are two main tells: size, including a seemingly shorter neck they keep tucked closer to the body, and size of the group.  Cacklers mob deep.  Average group size of the canada geese I’ve seen is three to seven, average for cacklers six to a dozen or more.  I feel like these groups can come together and break apart with minimal fuss, and the larger the environment they’re in – say, a wide open field vs. the margins of a road – the larger the group.

It’s a good look for a beast.  Drab brown-grey body with an almost scale-like look where the pale margins of feathers create a pattern, contrasted with a head in full-on orca colors.  I have heard geese are violent and will mess you up, but I’d like to pick one up and hug it.  They’re one of those birds.  They look squeezably soft.

Geese are famous for shitting damn everywhere, slimy green-brown-grey.  I’ve read they make up for having less room in their guts than cows by eating their own feces to give the nutrients a second pass through the pipe.  Yum.  There’s supposedly only one species of bird that is functionally a ruminant, which is the hoatzin of Central and South America, so plant-eating emeffs gotta make do.

Still, respect.  Pretty animals make the world a nicer place, if a dookier one.

My question tho, do they really cackle?  I don’t think so.  Shit just sounds like the usual honking and squonking.  A proper cackle is the province of the Halloween witch.  Halloween witches say Ree Hee Hee, with optional additional Hees, like chickadees have a variable number of Dees.  Cryptkeepers are closely related organisms, but you can tell the difference if you listen closely.  Their call is more like Nyee Hee Hee, again with the optional gratuity of Hees.

There are birds that are proper cacklers.  I would’ve named these guys something else.  Junior canadas, maybe.

Happy Halloween everybody.  It’s time.

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