5 Birds That Suck: A Drunk Column

5 Crows

Mother Nature threw me a softball to start. We hopped the fence to the river and immediately spotted three crows fighting over a Doritos bag on a telephone pole. Crows may be the only bird I know well. They're essentially tiny flying octopi; they're experts at solving puzzles, building tools, and developing multilateral approaches to the situation in Ukraine. Science had no idea just how intelligent they were until recently, when an ornithologist caught them in the wild memorizing our faces. Overnight, a species that used to only be a harbinger of death in fiction suddenly became the spirit animal of pop culture. But as stunningly intelligent as crows can be, they're also kind of dicks.

Crows frequently orchestrate cat fights for no other reason than the thrill of secondhand violence. Crows know that even a neutered domesticated animal is only a hairsbreadth away from falling back on some instinctual savagery. The same weird satisfaction you feel watching nerds fistfight over the rules of Warhammer, crows feel while watching house cats clumsily try to tap into that atrophied beast within themselves so they can remember how a mauling is supposed to go.

(Add those videos of crows making cats fight. I think there are at least three, so these drinks are in good faith: ***)

They're also famous for stealing the windshield wipers off of cars. Not to use them as nesting material or to solve cold fusion or anything, just to be generally awful, and presumably to murder each of us while we're doing 70 on the highway and a storm hits.

As I took pictures of the crows, I told my wife they may be the only bird I actually like, and she suggested that maybe it's because I can relate to their enthusiasm for fucking up someone else's day. I'm taking an extra two drinks just to soothe that sick burn she laid on me.**

4 The Osprey*

Within seconds of photographing the crows, something the size of a pterodactyl swooped down to chase them away and claim the same spot, because apparently all the birds in Los Angeles love this goddamn telephone pole. The birding guide was not prepared for me to see anything that could eat a dog, so I had to rely on my phone instead.

The osprey has a distinctive white breast* and a black streak across its eyes* that make it easy to identify. If you picture Pris from Blade Runner as a bird of prey, you've pretty much got it. The osprey can have a wingspan of almost 6 feet* and belongs to an entirely different family from hawks, falcons, and eagles.* In fact, it's the only surviving member of the Pandionidae* family, which isn't that surprising because it looks like a weird Ice Age holdout that's supposed to be extinct by now.

We waited patiently for it to eviscerate something nearby, and for a few promising seconds, a woman strolled past with clueless Bichon Frise*, but the bird was having none of it. The osprey just sat on the post looking majestic and boring, while those crows were probably off building a Tesla coil by now. Man, I miss those crows.

3 The Great Egret*

It's hard to convey here, but it took us just under two hours to find a single other bird. In that time, I realized that even though I had a bladder of alcohol on my back, I hadn't packed any water. When I asked my wife for some of hers, a quick skirmish broke out in the greater You Never Plan Ahead for Anything War. I mention all this because there are a bunch of unaccounted for drinks that happened during those dark two hours, most of them out of spite and hollow assurances that "Pirates lived on rum for months, I'll be fucking fine."

Now, on to this malnourished goose.

We had to ford a shallow stream of pure hepatitis just to get a clear shot of the great egret, and as soon as it noticed us, it started making a horrific choking noise. Whether it was trying to scare us off or convince us it had some sort of lung infection and wasn't worth eating I have no idea, but we watched it dry heave for over three minutes.* The great egret is easy to identify, with its long black legs* and narrow yellow bill it uses for spearing fish and reptiles.* It looks very similar to a crane, except it flies with its neck kinked and folded back on itself* because it has so much throat, it has no idea what to do with it all. Oh, it's also the symbol for the National Audubon Society*, which, frankly, probably isn't doing them any favors to recruit new members. If you want to get people excited about birds, give them a falcon pulling the wings off a sparrow in midair, not a lanky swan with scoliosis.

2 The Black-Necked Stilt*

The black-necked stilt is the science project evolution forgot about until the night before it was due. It's clearly just the plagiarized body of a sparrow with a hummingbird beak and two coffee straws stabbed through the bottom. I think it knows how absurd it looks too, because when I laughed at a group of them, they all bobbed their heads up and down in unison, as if to say, "It's true, we are patently ridiculous. That's why we've chosen to hide in this garbage river where no one ever visits except that woman with that raptor-snack dog and you two, who are clearly in a fight about something."

Well guess what, stilts, no one needs incisive criticism from something that looks like it flapped its way out of a Dali painting. Yes, our argument had shifted gears from unpreparedness to insensitivity. My wife nearly slipped, waist-deep, in the filthy stream, and instead of helping, I made a joke about the chances of her coming out of the experience pregnant with a river baby. I know now that this was inappropriate. But also, none of your goddamn business, bird. You deal with your creepy insect legs before coming at me about my shit.

1 Some Fucking Duck

We saw a duck. I have no idea what kind it is because we couldn't get close enough. The walls of the river got too steep to walk, so we had to climb up to a park above the water. Abuelitas watched from their shady benches while I got tangled in barbed wire trying to take pictures of a bird I don't even like. Their eyes saying, "You take from the experience what you give" and "You should not be so drunk at 3."

The park was good for us. Once we could get out of the sun, I apologized to my wife for being awful while she was trying to do this nice thing for me and promised that of course I would help her raise the river baby like it was my own. I told her that Argentine ducks have a long corkscrew penis that they can spring from great distances at females, and that that wasn't supposed to be a metaphor or anything, but is still a pretty interesting fact about ducks. She said, "I know, you've told me like a hundred times," and now we are in love again.

If there's a moral I can tack on to the whole experience, it's this: Birds will ruin everything good in your life if you give them a chance because they are genuinely awful. All birds, but especially those fucking black-necked stilts.

Soren is an Editor and Senior Writer for Cracked.com. You can follow him on Twitter or Tumblr.