The One Time Charlie Was Right About Bird Law on ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’

On It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Charlie Kelly considers himself to be “the best goddamn bird lawyer in the world,” which might be true if he had a law degree, bird lawyers existed and Harvey Birdman were never born.

Out of all of Charlie’s misconceptions about the world that turn into iconic running jokes, his fascination with birds and the complex system of laws that he thinks are regulating their existence has to be the best one. It just makes sense that Always Sunny’s rat-bashing, abortion-surviving, illiterate janitor would delude himself into believing that the birds whose eggs he turns into protein shakes and whose teeth he dreams about operate in an obscure sphere of the legal system that only the most unorthodox minds can comprehend. 

After all, Bird Law in this country is not governed by reason — and neither is Charlie.

However, there is exactly one law regarding aviary ownership that Charlie, somehow, almost understood, and he properly (or accidentally) invoked it in the first-ever mention of Bird Law on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. If the show goes on long enough, Charlie will continue to chase that high of his first and only correct Bird Law argument all the way to the Supreme Court like it’s a bunch of inhalants in a brown paper bag.

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 made it illegal to kill, capture, sell, trade or transport almost 1,100 species of birds, including all hummingbird species native to North America and, specifically, southeast Pennsylvania. So when Charlie corrected Dennis’ claim that he could keep a hummingbird as a pet in the Season Five episode “The Gang Exploits the Mortgage Crisis,” Charlie was correctly interpreting what can loosely be described as “bird law” for the first and only time in his life.

Unfortunately for the world’s greatest bird lawyer, literally everything Charlie said after shutting down Dennis’ pet hummingbird dreams was wildly incorrect — for one, hummingbirds aren’t a legal tender since they’re tiny fluttering nectar-eaters and not banknotes that can be offered to pay a debt. Secondly, no, you can not keep a seagull as a pet, as they’re also protected by that same Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. And, of course, there are very reasonable justifications for such protections on migratory birds, not the least of which is the fact that, as the name suggests, they need to migrate, and not just from Paddy’s Pub to Dennis and Mac’s apartment. 

But one out of four correct assessments of the legal system is still a massive improvement over the zero batting average Charlie would put up on Bird Law for the rest of the series, though his knowledge of a certain bird precious to the McPoyle family did help the gang get out of legal consequences in “McPoyle vs. Ponderosa: The Trial of the Century.” Even then, though, Charlie couldn’t invoke a single statute regarding Royal McPoyle’s legal status any more than he could speak Pocono Swallow, which, incidentally, isn’t a real species of bird.

Admittedly, in the end, Charlie’s lawyerings probably didn’t need this degree of analysis to come to the conclusion that Charlie isn’t, in fact, an expert on Bird law, so I’ll just regress, as I feel like I’ve made myself perfectly redundant.

Fillibuster.