I can’t say a lot about terns because I’ve almost never seen them.  This will be a short one.  Remember when I saw a great blue heron take a dump in breathtaking detail at the Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge?  On the same trip, I had a shitty long-distance view of what I took for seagulls – but they were weird.  Imagine a seagull with a raspy screeching cry and a bright carrot-orange beak, still flying in the usual seagull way, over the water.  Now imagine those weird seagulls would occasionally dive for fish, like an osprey or kingfisher.  Fucked up, right?

Those were caspian terns.  I was too far away to see the black cap on their heads, but based on where and when we were, it had to be them.  Some years later – 2024 in fact – I heard their call while visiting the rose garden at Point Defiance, and glimpsed a small group of them flying through the treetops.  More recently, they were one of the short list of suspects for a bird sighting I’ve never been able to get solid about.

That’s all you get, because that’s all I got.  Share tern stories below?

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I admit, Australia has America beat, in the category of evil genius super-bird species.  There are hella parrots there and corvids too.  But our reigning champ of world-beating nasty little punk emeff gangster birds does well for itself.  So well, it’s been mentioned in most of my posts about other birds thus far.  The american crow, Corvus brachyrhynchos, is the number one bird species in tha land.  Maybe some others have them outnumbered by a bit – smaller, mouse-like species – but crow numbers are still massive.  You can’t go a day without seeing or hearing crows.  In my little suburban town, some flocks can rival groups of pigeons and starlings.  Hundreds within line of sight, possibly part of a posse running to the low thousands.  I don’t think it was like this when I was a child.  There was a population boom in the mid to late nineties, I think?  And maybe there has been another one since then.

They’re numerous, they’re strong enough to bully, they’re conspicuous, they’re noisy, and they’re smart.  I find this interesting because if you look at them next to the other corvids of the area – steller’s jays and california scrub jays – they look like clumsy cowardly scruffy losers.  The jays are more well-groomed and light on their feet, fast and maneuverable enough in flight that they feel more secure in their ability to get away from a predator.  But who wins?  A thick-bodied, big-brained generalist animal.  It’s like comparing humans to gibbons.  Lesser apes have prettier colors and can run circles around us, practically fly through trees – but we still win.

Crows are us and we are crows.  They’re our heirs apparent, I think.  When it all goes to hell for us, their populations will suffer, but they’re too cool to fall.  Just waiting in the parking lot for our time to end, so they can pick our bones clean.  Ravens have more of a rep as portentous birds of doom, but they’re afraid of crows.  They know who’s winning.

But maybe crows aren’t as impressive as they seem.  In my region a girl famously began a relationship of commerce with the birds, trading treats for random objects.  Basically, crows are on a path to learning capitalism, and thus following in our footsteps.  Bad birds.  It’s the company they keep.  It was discovered by scientists in Seattle that crows can recognize human faces for years, in an experiment that involved wearing dick cheney masks.  When the masks were flipped upside down, the crows would flip their heads to process what they were looking at.  Clown behavior.  Don’t look up to humans, guys.

American crows look most similar to Europe’s carrion crows – blacker than a blackbird, around a pound, rude little dudes.  Once I was at a ferry terminal and saw some behaving in a way I hadn’t noticed before.  The slightly smaller crow had a brownish cast to its feathers, and seemed belligerent, bossing the blacker one around for food and attention.  Subject to human prejudices and armed with just enough knowledge to mislead myself, I assumed the smaller one was a female, the larger one male.  Like when a conventionally attractive and smooth dude has a gf who is a bug-eyed goblin, witch cackler, cigarette dripping off her lip, grabbing her crotch in public.  You know the type.  But no, the smaller one was baby, the smoother one was probably mom.

Probably, but crows are very sociable beasts.  Not as wild as acorn woodpeckers whose default social arrangement is a multi-parent polycule, but who feeds baby crows?  Everybody, including cousins and older siblings.  Baby crows start with a pink mouth and a voice like a kazoo, the mouth turning black and voice filling out with maturity.  When I hear that kazoo call, I always think, that’s a pinkmouth.

Some experiences I and others have had with american crows:

Balcony clods.  When feeding birds on the balcony of my old apartment, we observed the crows were too fearful to descend onto the balcony floor, only landing on the railing.  Meanwhile, smaller birds with better acceleration would land wherever they pleased.  It’s like how cats will be very brave around dogs that are on the far side of a fence or window.  They just don’t look like they’re so much larger than jays that they should be less adroit, but they are.  They can’t move as fast on land, can’t take flight as quickly.  Not even close.  Earlier I analogized it humans:gibbons::crows:jays:.  Another one that would fit is crow:jay::wolverine:marten.  These wolverines can fit a lot of peanuts in their throats.

The Killer.  I once saw a lone crow murdering a starling on the roof of a barbershop.

The Murder.  I once saw a murder of crows take a not-quite-fledged pigeon out of a nest and start killing it in the drive-thru at Del Taco.

The Harasser.  I have seen mobs of crows harass bald eagles and red-tailed hawks more times than I can easily recall.

Seal Food.  Visiting a rose garden at Point Defiance, near the zoo in Tacoma, we saw a crow with something large and shiny in his grip.  It was a chunk of fish we figured was almost certainly stolen from pinnipeds in the pokey.  A hot score.

Tool Use.  I’ve seen a crow with a tool so perfect I wondered if it it had fashioned the thing itself.  It was a short, clean, sharp stick, like a length of a food skewer that had been broken off, and it was held just right in the beak to function like the beak of a northern flicker, punching holes in wet sod to let tasty bugs and worms out.

Rain Birds.  When it rains out, crows are not fazed at all. If anything, they become more active at ground feeding, snatching all the earthworms that come to the surface.  The robins try as well, and maybe this is my imagination, but they seem just a touch more cowardly about the elements.

Salty Dogs.  There was a named subspecies of crow in the PNW that was demoted, not considered distinct enough.  The chief supposed difference was greater comfort in a coastal biome.  There’s a little state park we like to go to with a rocky / sandy beach and some scratchy grass.  A little creek there runs out of the woods and into Puget Sound, and the crows like to play in it, to bathe, and to glean food of some kind.  Oh, and they like to soften stolen potato chips by dunking them in the water.  Those crows are scruffier than usual, with weirdly clumped feathers and patchiness.  They seem like scurvy old scalawags.  We call them salty dogs.

Mimicry.  Crows hardly ever do mimicry that we can recognize, at least, not in our company.  But they can do it, and sometimes, they seem to enjoy it – learning a single sound and repeating it just to show off.  The one time I’ve noticed this was in a ghetto of Federal Way, where a single crow liked to make this sound somewhere between a cat and a baby.  I’d write it out as “mmBAHdul.”  It was much more musical and soft than their usual noises, leading me to wonder how good they could get at mimicry – and also what the hell it was imitating, of course.  I can’t tell crows apart 90% of the time, so in having a signature sound, this one did a good job of making its personal identity known.

Funsters.  When my husband was a kid, he saw crows messing with a piece of loose shingle on an apartment roof.  Not only did they keep coming back to flip it around, they’d go get friends to come back and check it out together.  Charming.  His mother likes to tell about how she saw one get a big worm on a rainy day and seemingly do a happy dance.  Was it just trying to shake the worm to death?  Hopping in surprise at how big the thing was?  Or do they dance for joy?  I don’t know.

Revenance.  Last but not least, sometimes when a soul dies with some unfinished vengeance type business and Jeet Kune Do skills, a crow brings their soul back from the land of the dead, to kong foo some jokers into moist chunks.  Did you know that The Crow was always a rip-off of a way worse Charlie Sheen movie called The Wraith?  The comic artist used the names of the killer gang directly, and the filmmakers reproduced that plagiarism without knowing.  True shit.  The Wraith was kinda fun tho.  It had pre- Twin Peaks Sherilyn Fenn in it – blonde.  Audrey Horne fans cry blood now.

Anyway, crows.  Ready to clean your skull when you die.  Give it up smooth; ain’t no telling when they’re down for a jack move.

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I’ve never been to Eurasia, but Eurasia has come to where I live. Like humans from my ancestral gene pool, just, boom, are you really supposed to be here guys? No? Make yourself at home I guess? The most aggressive and destructive invasive bird species in my region, if not the entire USA, is the eurasian starling.

Knowing that – knowing that they will bully diminishing native species out of their nests to pump out more soldiers for the unending murmuration – I have occasionally harbored an urge to kill large numbers of them. Use their shiny little feathers to make very fancy coats. Turn their skulls into ring ornaments. But not anymore. Now I think of them more like the Lystrosaurus that became the dominant land animal in the wake of The Great Dying. When the smoke clears on this man-made extinction level event, the only life we have left will be the fittest survivors. And here they are.

Starling experiences. I saw one being murdered by a crow. Heard a squeaking sound and cast about for it. On the roof of a little barbershop, a single starling was being stabbed to death by a single crow. Each time the bigger bird’s beak came down, another squeak. Score one for native species.

In college I was eating lunch with this William Shatner-looking dude at a fancy fish restaurant on the Seattle waterfront. Gulls, crows, starlings, and house sparrows were everywhere. Shatner was distracted for a moment and a starling stole one of his pieces of fried fish. Starlings are bigger than most LBBs but smaller than the average thrush, so this was no mean feat. The fish piece probably weighed as much as the bird. Years later at a fish and chips place on Green Lake, I saw starlings all around, and knew what they were there for.

One time at the mall in Federal Way, I was walking behind it, near the big power line towers. I heard a buzz and crackle and thought there might be an issue with the towers, but looked up and the majority of that sound was coming from little beasts. I used to ride the bus with a Russian lady who told me their word for them was something like “staretsya.” I was surprised it had “star” in it.

They’re great mimics, but they do sound tinny, like a tape recorder. Their cousin the common mynah is sometimes kept as a pet, and there is a very cute video of one in Japan that knows how to say “I understand!” (“wakarimashita!”) in a bitchy voice – a hilarious lie. One time when me and my husband (then boyfriend) were walking to the bus stop in the morning, I mentioned their mimicry and he did a wolf whistle at a flock – which was instantly returned by one of them. Only time I’ve heard their mimicry so overtly. I think most of the time they’re doing natural calls, or imitating other birds, and city sounds. It’s all a burbling staticky wash.

Starlings are drab for birds in their family. Any number of starling cousins look way more flashy. But still, they’re pretty cool. Powerful iridescence. Dots (the stars?), lil light brown streaks. When they fly, they look like fighter jets. They’re amazingly adroit for mid-size birds, like they’re evolving toward hummingbird powers. They are, of course, famous for flying in excellent synchrony, in flocks that move like undulating scarves on the wind, called murmurations. The more birds, the more impressive it looks. And unfortunately, we have no shortage of them.

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He rocks in the treetops all day long, rocking and bopping and singing his song.  Does it sound like tweedlydeedlydeet?  Not exactly, but it’s more variable than you’d expect.  Many times when I’ve heard an unfamiliar bird call or seen a bird flying in some strange way, it turned out to just be another american robin.  Bitches should be called migratory thrushes; they are not real robins.  But they are ridiculously successful animals in North America.  I wonder if blue sky posts can embed in wordpress ok.

actually I think democrats should move 2 the right & just become republicans and republicans should become giant skeleton monsters and giant skeleton monsters should become giant skeleton monsters that pee wasps

— birdrightsactivist (@probirdrights.bsky.social) November 7, 2024 at 11:05 AM

Anyway, american robins have the worst fucken theme song ever.  But they are respectable beasts.  I like the white ring around their eyes, helps them stand out from the dark hood, looks expressive.  The yellow beak and feet.  The red breast, very cool.  Give them a hand.  Yes, the song they sing around March 1st through most of the year, that sounds like a horror movie soundtrack, and one time my home boy Clark heard one singing it at three AM, but you gotta respect the hustle.

Sometimes I see about a dozen of them in a flock.  I think they’re more likely to posse up during migrations, but I’m no expert.  My dad said he used to see flocks more like a hundred, back when he was a youth, and remembered particularly watching them get drunk on rotten fruit.  The sixties, maaan.

Our robins get worms.  Not those ones.  Probably those ones too, but they eat mad worms.  I’ve heard invasive European earthworms are an ecosystem-crushing omnipresent disaster in the USA.  But I wonder, is their presence part of why migratory thrushes are so successful?  American robins and crows love the hell out of those things.  It’s every day.  Early birding.  Early worming.  Rise and shine, and by shine, I mean jerk a stretchy pink-grey freak out of a lawn and eat it.

USian robins are a bit smaller and much more graceful than USian crows.  The crows have a shambolic walk, and can only comfortably go faster by switching to a hop.  Robins run so smoothly their body doesn’t move up and down at all – just legs furiously wheeling beneath them, like Shaggy and Scoob.  I’ve dubbed it “the robin run,” but it’s not too unusual of a small bird gait.  It’s the crows that are especially maladroit.

Where do they migrate to?  They migrate, but they’re here all year.  But sometimes they do look like they’re going somewhere.  My guess is that in winter I’m seeing alaskans and canadians, and in summer i’m seeing guys that winter in california.  I don’t know.  They get around, like so many beach’d boys.  I’m getting bugged flying up and down the same old strip, I gotta find a new place where the birds are hip.

Why did I ever listen to the oldies station as a youth?  Big mistake.  This article is over, man!

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The rock dove, aka the rock pigeon, the common pigeon, the dove, winged rats, etc etc, this is a feral domestic animal found all around the globe – especially around humans.  They’re on the “life list” of birds I’ve seen, and they’re on yours too.  Along with Canada geese, they’re the biggest purveyors of bird feces where you don’t want them to be, in much of the USA.  But still, they’re ours -we made them- and I do like them an awful lot.

Pigeons are a cool group of birds.  Different species are found all over the world, and it’s surprising to me what they have in common.  Some diverse far-flung groups of birds like woodpeckers have more variety in proportion and shape than pigeons do.  For some reason, doves all have that broad powerful chest, stretchy neck that narrows at the top, and a lil’ head with pigeon beak.  How do I describe that beak?  You know what it looks like, and it looks the same from ivory-colored desert beauty on one side of the planet to upside-down parrot-colored jungle freak on the other.  Dodos were the one outlier in that beak shape.  I know the cloning projects have been scams and bullshit, but I’d love to see it happen.

In my neighborhood there are only two species of pigeon that I know of:  the one this article is about, and invasive Eurasian collared doves.  I do like the invaders, as rarely as I see them, but this article is not their time.

Domestic doves are known for coating the cities of the world in guano.  At one time in the Middle East, silo-shaped dovecotes had chutes designed to spill fertilizer into fields of crops.  Smart.  Now people remember after the fact that anything humans can build, pigeons can perch on, and they have to cover unintended landing strips in bird spikes.  I heard anarchist cockatoos in Oz are tearing up that hostile architecture; good job.

Lingering traces of domestication syndrome haunt the gene pool of these animals, some over a thousand generations removed from active human care.  You see it in their lack of fear around humans, of course, but also in their mottled colors.  Many have reverted to natural enough color schemes, like if feral domestic cats had achieved higher rates of brown tabby in their numbers, but many pigeons are missing a category of pigment, or gone leucistic or piebald or polka-dotted.  I like the natural colors, but the mutants can be very pretty.

The first place pigeons became important in my life was as supporting actors in John Woo movies.  Some other random experiences:  Seeing them puffed up to the size of bowling balls, trying to hunker down for the freezing weather in the International District bus tunnel.  Seeing their fucked up malformed feet, and seeing an article on the subject just as my curiosity about it was reaching its peak.  Seeing a baby pigeon ganked by crows on Mother’s Day.  Seeing baby pigeons close up for the first time, in a nest at the Federal Way Transit Center.

I’ve wanted to have a pet bird I could easily snuggle with, and if I ever get over the annoyance of cleaning the cage etc, pigeons are on my list.  They’re domestic animals so would feel less nervy about it than 99% of parrots, and they’re less scratchy / bitey than chickens.  I wouldn’t even get a fancy pigeon.  Plain ol’ winged rat is good enough for me.  I would hold it under my arm like a football and get gross stains on all my clothes.  Worth it?

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There are some birds that are so successful I have to wonder if they’re out of balance with nature.  It may be an indigenous species, but is it overpopulated because humans messed something up for them?  Causing problems for less human-adapted cousins?  Crows are known to have had a major population spike in the Pacific Northwest.  How about chickadees?  How about dark-eyed juncos?

Dark-eyed juncos are in the New World sparrows, or Passerellidae.  They could be the most populous bird in Western Washington, or a close contender to the more obvious ones.  But you might not know it.  In parking lots and urban centers, invasive starlings, house sparrows, and house finches are much more obvious.

It’s when you get into areas with a little less pavement, like the apartment complexes across the street from the grocery store, that the native mobs give them a run for their money.  As ground feeding birds, juncos are more visible than chickadees and nuthatches, and they are just everywhere.  So many of them, making a call like a wobbling wire, flashing the white feathers on the sides of their tails like flamenco dancers, as they flit from bush to beauty bark to bush.

Passerellids are LBBs (little brown birds) that can be hard to ID, but hereabouts the dominant morph of dark-eyed junco is the “Oregon,” which has a strongly black hood.  The only ground-feeding bird you might mistake them for is a spotted towhee, with black hood and reddish flanks, but they have very different habits and calls, the towhee with a dramatic blood-red eye and white spots.  Juvenile juncos make a cricket-like chirp when begging for food and attention, following around a parent.  They can distinguished because the hood is less strongly black and the flashy white tail feathers are short.

I didn’t look up anything outside of the genealogy.  I just picked all this up from observation, which was easy as hell because there are so many of them.  Still, it’s nice to see a native bird doing well, and they are very cute.  Their little white beaks have a lavender hint which is more obvious in photography than in flyby.  They do fly by, almost like barn swallows, in front of your bicycle wheels or your car grill.  Is it to show off for potential mates?  A daredevil routine?  The must do it well; I’ve never seen a dead one.

I don’t have a lot of stories about them.  The one time I saw brood parasitism in action, a junco was the victim.  I once did a series of four small mixed-media paintings, birds with roguish accoutrement and nicknames.  Gangster birdies – a house sparrow, house finch, dark-eyed junco, and white-crowned sparrow.  The only one that sold at the gallery was the house sparrow, for thirty-five 2010 dollars.  The junco lost that contest, but they still win every day.

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The largest bird I can see with any regularity is the great blue heron.  Technically there’s some overlap in wingspan with bald eagles, but I see those less often, and I do think they are smaller overall, for not having a heron’s snake neck and long bill.

They’re pretty cool.  The way color and texture of feathers varies over the body lends interest, but the dominant color is low key blue-grey.  Classy.  Herons, egrets, and the hilarious bitterns are in the Ardeidae, united in having the long legs, snake neck, and stabbing beak.  They skulk, they wade, they snap up a small animal, and they swallow it whole.

I once saw one put away a very chubby rodent like this.  Grab it, toss it in the air, then swallow.  Freaky.  I’ve read that they are so voracious they will die from swallowing inadvisable prey.  There was a case in California where one had swallowed an eel that produces choking mucus, and died.  Then the heron next to it grabbed another eel and went out the same way.  C’mon, guys.

More random experiences…  On a birding trip to the Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge, I got my best view ever of one, through the free mounted telescope.  The bird had landed on a rail further down the walkway, and through the scope was as easy to see as a pet cat in your lap.  Cool details, beautiful animal, but when it defecated, it looked like somebody chucking a coffee mug full of liquid paper out the backside.

One time I took a vacation all by myself when I was alone in life, no friends family or lovers to bring along.  It was the dark of winter, cold and abysmal, taking a ferry from Seattle to Port Townsend.  The weather kept me from seeing as much wildlife as I would have preferred, but I got to hear the call of a heron for the first time – a great croak, like you’d imagine coming from a man-eating toad in D&D.  Nice.

Right after that I returned to art school on the Seattle waterfront, the early class having me there before dawn.  I heard the call again, and looked down just in time to see one gliding between the masts of docked sailboats, illuminated by amber street lamps.

A few times at beaches in South King County I was able to wade within thirty feet of one while it fished.  Not as good as the telescope view, but kind of fun.  One time while birdwatching in Ballard, I saw one across the locks in a park where they are known to nest, feeding a chick what looked like a four foot snake.

I just like to see a big-ass bird in flight.  They’re not the truly big ones, but respectable, and they’re what I’ve got.  Watch the big angel wings beat the sky, and if you’re lucky, hear the big devil croak.

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TLC said they don’t want no scrubs, and it was clear when that song debuted that it was about me.  I was born further south than where I was raised, so I am a California Scrub.  I’m just one descriptor shy of being this bird: the California scrub jay.  CSJs are on the boring end of jay styles, with a very generic bird profile, and more brown and grey than most other jays.  But they’re a cool bird.  Decent size and a tendency to briefly alight on fences and awnings, so easy to spot.

Less chonky and clumsy than crows, they don’t stick around for long.  Blink and you’ll miss them, and when I was a kid, I did a lot of blinking, because I only ever saw them once, and not close enough to ID.  I had assumed they were the blue jays known as blue jays, which, as it turns out, do not live in the region at all.  I am only confident those were CSJs in retrospect, because I am once again living on the very same street where I was at the time of that encounter, and CSJs are everywhere here.

Speaking of awnings, that was the only time in my life when you might have caught me lounging on a roof.  I was living in squalor and family dysfunction, but I was living on the second floor, and outside of my window was some rooftop.  I didn’t spend much time on it.  One night my brother and I saw something like the aurora borealis, but it didn’t make sense, middle of summer?  I know jack about shit.  I was skinny with long hairs, and I sang the Misfits’ Last Caress in the garage of that apartment, with my homies on instruments.  White people foolery.  Make the neighbors hate you.

CSJs only came back into my life again within the last couple of years.  I was living up the hill in Federal Way and commuting to work in the valley, at a building surrounded by scrubby fields of the exact kind you’d expect for them.  And yet I didn’t see them the first year I worked there.  Don’t know why.  When I did start to glimpse them, they were at long distance, shy, flighty.  Took a long time to get a positive ID, but once it happened?  Some pretty nice close encounters.

Sadly my work moved out of that building, which is surely slated for destruction by whoever it was sold to.  The enshittification of everything continueth.  But just as my work moved uphill to Fed Way, I moved downhill to Auburn, and CSJ City.

California Scrub Jays are blue on top, white on bottom, with a little reddish brown vest.  I’m not usually close enough to see this, but they have a bit of a black mask and white eyebrows.  They’re not the only jays in this neighborhood, but Steller’s jays prefer the cover of trees, are out in the open less often.  But I saw Steller’s pretty often during a decade of Federal Way, so scrub jays feel fresh and cool to me now.

I want to see scrubs
Scrubs are some birds that can get the love from me
I hear them inside when they have to cry
The sound down my chimney

Eh, needs work.  Not happening.

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