Yeah, like the bird.

Takahē bird in Te Anau eating Grass, Nate Sundance-Kid

A whole flightless new zealand bird whose existence I just keep forgetting somehow :( Kiwis steal all the spotlight

#oh he’s round #they really know how to make a bird in Aotearoa

YOU’RE DAMN RIGHT WE DO

Once again randomly remembered this story about a couple who had a small parrot - pretty sure it was a budgie - who didn't talk but learned to communicate with people in its own way. Once it figured out that people always turn to check their phones when the notification sound comes on, it started making the text message notification sound to request human attention. The parrot also liked to follow people to the door whenever guests were leaving, and would use its wings to pantomime the motions of a person putting their coat on. A very clever, charming bird.

And every once in a while it just randomly hated some people. Not for any real reason, or even reason to suspect bad vibes, but by deciding "fuck this person in particular" for shits and giggles alone. And one time when the owners had invited a new friend to their home, the bird decided that it Did Not Like Her.

So in the middle of polite conversation, the bird - who was free to roam around the apartment at the time - hopped onto the living room coffee table, right in front of the unwanted guest. And in that moment, the owners put two and two together and understood that whatever mischief the bird had decided to do, it was now too late to stop it.

But instead of unleashing the absolute hell that even the tiniest displeased parrot could be capable of, the little budgie made its little "may I have your attention please" cell phone notification sound, and once the guest was focused on the bird, looked at her dead in the eye while doing the putting-my-coat-on wing motion.

The guest did not recognise the pantomime for what it was, but she was nonetheless delighted that the parrot would do a little wing-roll dance for her. And the host couple were at first too stunned and then too polite to tell her how impressive that gesture truly was. Their bird had shown both remarkable restraint and cleverness by using its entire vocabulary of human communication just to say

"I have an important announcement: I think you should leave."

#TwoForTuesday + #ToucanTuesday :

Wilhelm Kuhnert (German, 1865-1926) Toucans (n.d.) Pencil & watercolor picked out in white, on paper, 27.9 x 17.8 cm

🆔 Toco Toucan (Ramphastos toco), also known in Kuhnert's time as the Giant Toucan (it's the largest living toucan species)

Spotted Pardalote (Pardalotus punctatus), family Pardalotidae, order Passeriformes, Australia

photograph by Subhranil Das www.instagram.com/subhranildas

tumblr is the only place that im honest, how do you tell your instagram followers that you just saw a bird that changed your life? they are soulless on that app, they dont give a fuck

Eurasian nuthatch/nötväcka. Värmland, Sweden (March 6, 2021).

Lady Amherst’s Pheasants (Chrysolophus amherstiae), male displays to a fine ass female, family Phasianidae, order Galliformes, Sichuan, China

Photograph by Henry Koh

Pins // Karajishi Designs

the black-headed jay is a corvid found in asia, and is very similar in appearance and behavior to its close relative, the eurasian jay. however, the black-headed jay has slightly different coloration in addition to its namesake black head. the black-headed jay feeds on a variety of plant and animal material, and nests in open areas where there is visible ground as opposed to dense forest.

the unicolor jay is a member of the corvid family native to central america. named for its fairly solid blue color, the unicolor jay is an outlier among other jays, who typically have some kind of patterning or defining marking. little research has been done on unicolor jays specifically, but based on research of other jays, they are likely intelligent birds with varied diets and aggressive mannerisms towards other species.

the pacific baza is a slender, medium-sized hawk found in australia, indonesia, papua new guinea, the solomon islands, and east timor. they are the only new guinean raptor with a crest. somewhat unusually for a hawk, this species is omnivorous, and feeds on fruits and vegetation in addition to lizards, birds, and other small prey. females are slightly heavier than males, with more brown coloration on their uppersides, sometimes with more dark barring on their secondary flight feathers. both sexes are primarily gray, brown, and white. this species is largely non-migratory.

This implies that a lot of species we determined to not have self recognition might do well with a modified test.

here is the full paper, it's available without a paywall. this is so wonderful. sweet, sweet chickens

Did you know that peafowl are born with a full set of flight feathers? It only takes them 3-4 days to remove the sheaths and put a little length on them, and then they are capable of flight!

It's very obnoxious!

glad that came through in text

One rainy day

cockatoo ipad kid experiment

my friend left her window open in her bedroom and came back to find this

look at his self-satisfied little face, the cheeky shit

motherfucking australia

if there was a post to describe australia, this is it

wait. 

you mean to tell me this isn’t even a pet bird?

that in australia, you have wild birds that just fly from house to house with the express purpose of fucking shit up?

fucking HELL australia, what is wrong with you?

wake up australia 

That’s what birds do

They fly around and fuck shit up

Do you have some kind of mysterious nice birds in your weird foreign country

Do birds in America and England fly into your house and make the bed and tidy up the living room a little bit

It’s cold here, so they just bounce off the windows and lie there and twitch spasmodically while you look for the shovel.

Basically hurling themselves at windows is the worst thing birds do

yeah man a kookaburra literally flew into a classroom at my high school and just sat his smug ass down on top of the desk for a good 20 minutes

why has nobody mentioned the fact that in australia there are 3-4 months a year where everybody just accepts that they’re going to get attacked by magpies. It is literally called “swooping season” and these birds will fly down to peck your fucking face, and people get their eyes ripped out and shit, it’s fucking brutal.

My teacher had to go to hospital and have surgery because of swooping season. It was in the parking lot of school and all the kids would do a mad dash towards the car as the magpies tried to kill us.

no but when you’re 12 years old and riding your bike like mad on the way home from school with an icecream bucket on your head with like branches and shit sticking out if it to scare them off and none of this is considered strange

what the actual fuck australia 

I am pretty sure all of these Australia stories are a massive, globally-spanning trolling effort, and only the people who have visited the country are allowed to be in on the joke.

Nope.

Went there.

Parrots tried to take our car.

Came home IN A FUCKING HURRY.

Interesting thing about magpies - they’re not great at identifying individual humans visually, but if you make yourself identifiable in some way they’re usually open to reason. We used to have some very aggressive swoopers in our back yard - as soon as they realised that the humans *inside* the fence never bothered them and were the source of the delicious compost heap, they turned into flying black and white guard dogs who would viciously assault any passing stranger but never bothered anyone inside the yard. Several times they swooped at us when we approached from outside, then when we walked into the yard they would pull up and act incredibly apologetic like sorry ma’am I had no idea it was you I would never please don’t stop stocking the food pile.

There was another little group of magpies in the park who would attack any solo pedestrian but never bothered anyone walking a dog or pushing a pram, because apparently those were identifiable traits indicating a non-threatening human. In the spirit of inquiry, I started going out of my way to be polite to the magpies - carefully walking a wide arc around them when they were on the ground, etc - and emitting an identifiable call of ‘hello birdie’ before swooping season started. 

I spent the next ten years crossing that park at least once a day and as long as I turned at the first flutter of wings and said ‘hello birdie’ to the magpie waiting to attack as soon as my back was turned, I was fine. Every time, the magpie would stare at me for a minute and then fly off to harass some other pedestrian because apparently the magpies and I, we were cool. 

Parrots are a lot less open to negotiation, and the little bastards travel in flocks. Beware the parrots. 

Australia: the only country where it is necessary to sign a peace treaty with the birds in order to stay unmangled.

They lost a war against emus. The the magpie stories are unsurprising.

what… what happened with the emus

The Great Emu War of 1932: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War

✨This is a Great Eared Nightjar appreciation post✨