My brother was living in Kansas with wife and kid.  He helped with air fare so I could visit.  His favorite thing  is going to zoos, so we went on big long car rides to visit Wichita and Kansas zoos.  During one of these rides, in the great distance, flying over those “amber waves of grain,” I saw a lone, massive, white bird.  Based on an impression of its form and flight, I decided it was a white pelican – the only one I’ve ever seen, assuming the ID was even right.

I’ve only ever seen the smaller brown pelican on a trip to Ocean Shores, a tourist spot in my state.  They looked like pterosaurs in flight, and I saw a few very long flight feathers shed on the beach.  Very cool.  But I never have gotten a close-up look at a pelican, even though it’s apparently a pretty easy thing to do.  In internet videos they do not seem at all shy.

Like the herons I mentioned, pelicans are ridiculous eaters.  You can find videos of them eating random birds the size of their own heads, trying to eat things that won’t even fit down their own elastic gullets, or just staring menacingly at humans, as if to say “give up the goods.”  Not every creature needs to be thinking deep thoughts.  That’s fine.  Live to eat, if you will.  If they were about anything other than cramming stuff in their throat, what would that even be?  Pelican poetry.

Not much to say; this bird was a glimpse.

–

I’ve been reminded recently that glaucous-winged and western seagulls hybridize in my region so heavily there’s a common name for the hybrid swarm – olympic gulls.  But I’m relatively sure the most populous seagulls in my ol’ stompin’ grounds of Federal Way are pure glaucous-winged.  Their wingtips look straight-up white, and they are pale as ghosts, gliding through the treetops.  Or chilling in the parking lot of the mall.

The gullish mallrats are nice-looking.  I like the sound of their calls.  I think they nest at the largely abandoned park & ride behind the mall, and when traffic clears out in the evening around the mall itself, they like to sit right on the ground.  Not sure what they get out of the concrete beach, but it’s cool to see wildlife that close up.

Other times I’ve seen seagulls in the past, they’ve probably been the hybrids, or western gulls, or I don’t even know.  Seagulls are notoriously difficult to tell apart, save for the species that have the most extreme differences.  Hybridization doesn’t help the issue, so mostly I don’t even bother trying to get a positive ID.  Don’t care enough.

I will continue to like seagulls until the day one shits on me, and may that day never come.  They are pretty and their sound is iconic.  It’s the music of a place like Puget Sound.  I wanna grab one under my arm and give it a hug.  Bitches can steal my ice cream any time.  I just hope I get a good look at them.

I heard most of the seagulls in Australia are tiny things.  Around here they are mighty big.  When I was a small child and saw some flying in front of cathedral’s stained glass windows, I fancied they were so huge that they must be albatrosses.  No, odds are that I have never seen an albatross.  Seagulls here tho.  Big ‘uns.

Seagulls fly by “dynamic soaring,” where they rely less on broad wings catching all of the air than on long narrow wings making the best use of whatever air they can get.  The result is that they fly in pretty distinctive ways.  Usually, it looks something like a hawk’s flight, but lower altitude and much faster.

Like many prolific wild animals, it’s easy to see tragedy in their lives, all over the place.  Injury, death, illness.  I’ve seen a juvenile wandering around a parking garage in SoDo with no parent in sight, unable or unwilling to fly away.  Come here, birdy.  I pick you up like a football and take you home…  No, I’ll never do that.  But they make me want to.

There are a lot of good internet videos of seagulls being funny.  Probably no small amount of cruel videos as well; tread carefully.  One of my faves is a smaller gull in the UK using the cat door to run into this little cottage and eat cat food.  Also winning, the little steppy dance some do to raise edible creatures from the sand.  Check ’em out.

–

House finches are a very common bird in urban and suburban areas here.  As befits the name house finch.  I suppose they may breed in rafters; I wouldn’t know.  I do know they don’t belong here.  There are closely related indigenous finches that are surely being hedged out by them.  House finches are boring LBBs.  Some are streaky (females? juveniles?), some are just beige, but they have a kind of red that magically appears when the sun comes out.  Sometimes kinda pretty.  More noteworthy is their elaborate song, which is nice to hear, since the other common perching bird in their territory is the much less musical house sparrow.

Let’s talk about places.

Mexico?  Some animals that are out of balance with nature spread naturally with the increase of human populations, like coyotes and anna’s hummingbirds and opossums.  Some are actively imported, like house sparrows and starlings were to the US.  I feel like I’ve read that house finches in america were descended from pet bird trade, but I think they’re from Mexico?  So they could’ve just gradually moved north, being better adapted to city life than their cousins.

Seattle.  The first place I took note of these birds was in downtown Seattle, near the Cornish* campus on the edge of the South Lake Union neighborhood.  I saw and mostly heard a flock in the little trees down there, making the world sound a little nicer.

Federal Way.  We tried feeding birds on our balcony for a while.  The house finches had an interesting behavior that set them apart from the rest.  Whenever my husband sneezed, even from indoors on the other side of a pane of glass, they’d get scared into flying off.  They’d come right back, but it was a level of caution that even smaller birds like chickadees didn’t bother with.

Auburn.  My current employer used to have a cool building in Auburn, not far from the railroad tracks, surrounded by big fields, edged with some nice tall trees.  Goodbye wildlife, they moved.  On the old campus, there were some disused buildings that served as nesting grounds for a lot of birds, and I think primarily for house finches.  For the moment, the current owners of those buildings haven’t torn them down, and I suspect that when you see house finches at the mall, they were born and bred next to my old call center.

They’re a common bird where I live now, though I think they don’t come down to the ground level in my cul-de-sac as much as others.  I usually just hear the song or see them fly between trees.  I don’t think much about them, but they’re fine.  Bird it up, homies.

–

*Cornish College of the Arts has waxed and waned over the years.  Early this millennium, they worked hard to get accreditation, and build up their program.  But they’ve always been primarily a dumping ground for the rich kids that were too indolent to be business majors, and the bullshit student body conspired with the bullshit administration and the bullshit rich donors to squander that work, the graduating class dwindling from dozens to a handful, in the space of ten years, the classes going from at least half-assed intellectual fare down to “finger-painting, if you feel like it today.”  They were recently acquired by a better university, and they fucking deserved it.

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?

–

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.

–

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.

–

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!

–