I read an anecdote from someone whose African Grey didn’t particularly get along with her Amazon parrot, Paco. One night she was preparing cornish hens for dinner, while the grey hung out with her in the kitchen. He got a closer look at one of the hens, looked his mama dead in the eyes and asked, “Paco?” Then he laughed.
that is one sadistic bird
I am slightly afraid now.
I love birds?
African Grey Parrots are one of the smartest birds, and seems they can be known to play “jokes” or “pranks” on their owners or any visitors.
I was visiting a friend of the family one time and I was just casually watching tv when I thought I heard the water running. I go into the kitchen but everything’s fine. the parrot looks at me and says “gotcha”.
Parrots are awesome.
I have an African Grey named Loki and he lives up to his name.
He likes to scream and mimic the sounds of things falling off the shelf and when we run into the room to see what’s happening he says “The cat did it! Bad Sammy!” and laughs.
Whenever he gets mad at me he flies away from me, but since he can’t fly very well, he always crash lands. And the first thing he says when I go to pick him up, without fail, is always “You need to vacuum,” in a very bitter grumble.
Loki likes to call our cat to him. He’ll sit there for minutes saying “here kitty kitty kitty.” The cat will come, walk up to the bird, get bit and then Loki will laugh as the cat screams and runs away. This goes on for hours.
If it’s late at night and he’s tired, but I’m still up with the lights on, he’ll say “Loki go night night.” It’s starts of in a normal tone and then gets louder and louder until he’s screaming “LOKI GO NIGHT NIGHT!”
If he sees my dad fall asleep, he screams like a little girl to scare my dad awake. And then laughs. He’s kind of perfected that evil laugh.
But the best one was when I brought home the man who has since become my ex for the first time, Loki looked him dead in the eyes and said “I’m going to bite you.” My parrot was the first one to see what a bad person my ex. He was smarter than us all.
African Greys are like the greatest animal on the planet
When I was a kid, we had a rescued african grey called Dodi, and once I was arguing with my mum about my bed time, and the parrot (who had some very foul mouthed previous owners) just shouted at me “for fuck sake go to bed!”
also whenever we hoovered he’d call us “yoooou dusty cunts”
best thing was he had a scottish accent
Reblogging for Scottish swearing parrot
I almost died choked with a piece of cake because of the last one.
Don’t be sad, friend! They know exactly what they’re doing. ^v^
Pigeons have the same cognitive capacity as five year old humans, and have been documented taking advantage of our transportation systems to commute back and forth from foraging grounds farther than they could have easily flown, at a much lower energy cost.
They know the times, which trains go where, where all the best food stops are, and which stop is theirs.
And they tend to be model passengers, taking their seats under the big human seats, and politely filing out at their work and home stops. ^v^
It’s actually impossible to measure how many fucks a corvid give because there is no device sensitive enough to register such a tiny amount.
science/animal side of tumblr… explain to me the birb thing
Tail Pulling is a behavior noted in many corvids. The practical application is to create a distraction that will allow the birb to make off with the target’s food. Imagine being in the lunch room and a large fellow has a Twinkie you covet. You can’t just take it from him because he’ll defend his Twinkie. But if you thwap him on the back of his neck and then dash around to snag the Twinkie while he investigates, you stand a decent chance of enjoying spongey goodness. This is basically that in birb form.
Except corvids don’t only do this as a distraction. Sometimes they seem to just being doing it to mess with other animals/birbs. But to use my lunch room analogy, there are times you might thwap someone sneakily on the back of the neck just for amusement. Primates exhibit behavior that appears to be just be annoying other animals for amusement. Given how intelligent crows are, its not unlikely that this is a manifestation of an innate desire to just fuck with someone else for the fun of it. Such as this from the link above:
THANK YOU FOR THE BIRB KNOWLEDGE
BECAUSE IT IS FUN
This speaks to me on a molecular level.
birbs just wanna have fun
Sorry to hijack a little, but to put it bluntly, corvids are also pretty BALSY. They are more than prepared to harass other huge birds of prey which could deal them a lot of damage. There’s plenty of cases of corvids ‘riding’ other birds as well. It’s often to harass the larger bird out of the area, but as @red3blog said, they quite often (in layman’s terms) enjoy fucking shit up for fun.
‘Where the hell is the seatbelt on this thing?’
I mean they deserve a medal for having such huge bird balls imo
You might be surprised to learn there are a lot of different species of raven and crow! The taxonomic difference between a raven and a crow (that is, whether a species gets named of or the other) is size and lifespan rather than genetic grouping. When comparing the species most of us are most familiar with – the American crow (C. brachyrhyncos) and common raven (C. corax), which will be the two I’m focusing on here – you can’t exactly tell the bird’s age most of the time, so if you have other animals or objects to compare the bird to, size is often the first clue.
The common raven is is massive for a passerine. It’s the size of a red-tailed a hawk, with a wingspan over four feet. Crows, on the other hand, are typically about the size of an African grey parrot. Compare someone holding a crow vs someone holding a raven:
And lemme tell ya, it’s one thing to READ about how big they are, but it’s another to SEE it.
If you see a corvid in flight and can’t get a bead on its proportions, the shape of the tail and flight feathers is another good identifier. A crow’s tail is triangular or fan-shaped, while a raven’s is wedge-shaped (ie the middle tail feathers are longest). Both have well-defined primaries, but a raven’s are much deeper and tend to spread wider. Ravens tend to soar a lot, too; crows are consistent flappers.
Finally, if you can get a good look at the head, the differences are pretty obvious. A raven has a beak that hooks at the end and is as long as its head (or in the case of a Chihuahuan raven, longer than!) while a crow’s beak is straighter, shorter, and lighter-looking in general. Both have nasal bristles, but the shape these bristles form is different due to beak size (a raven’s often looks squared off). Crows are kinda shiny and a bit fluffy; ravens are iridescent and have a very distinctive “beard” of shaggy feathers at their throats which bristles up like hackles when they call.
Finally, their voices are a bit different – a crow’s flat, high caw vs a raven’s deep, resonating kronk – but both species have a very wide range of natural vocalisations and are accomplished mimics. [This video] has some great examples of the caw vs kronk sounds.
I told this story to a few guildies a while back and decided to archive it in a longer format; so here is the story of The Great Flamingo Uprising of 2010 as told to me by my favorite cousin who was a keeper at the time.
In addition to the aviary/jungle exhibit, our zoo has several species of birds that pretty much have the run of the place. They started with a small flock of flamingos and some free-range peacocks that I’m almost certain came from my old piano teacher’s farm. She preferred them to chickens. At some point in time they also acquired a pair of white swans (Or as I call them, “hellbirds”) and some ornamental asian duckies to decorate the pond next to the picnic area. Pigeons, crows, assorted ducks and a large number of opportunistic Canada geese moved in on their own.
Now; the ponds that dot the zoo property (I don’t remember how many there are but the one by the picnic area is the only one with swans) were also full of ginormous koi fish, some of whom by now are at least three feet long. Sensing an opportunity to cash in on the koi, the zoo put up little vending machines all over the place that dispense handfuls of food pellets. I swear to god the fish can hear the crank turning, and will show up at the nearest railing, blooping expectantly at whoever happens to be standing there and doing their best to appear starving and desperate.
Like this.^ And they weren’t the only ones who learned to associate the sound with the imminent arrival of food. The Canada geese knew a good deal when they saw one, and had long since ceased to migrate anyway. They formed roving gangs of thug-geese and staked out their turf around the vending machines, ready to mug anyone with pocket change. Picture yourself as a small child squaring off with a bird fully prepared to strip search you while standing on your feet and yelling “HWAAAAAKK!!” in your face. It’s traumatizing to you and deeply hilarious to your parents.
Anyway.
The flamingos had their spot near the zoo entrance and never seemed to mind the presence of the other birds, as they kept themselves to themselves and didn’t really like the taste of fish pellets. The problem lay in that their shrimp pond was close to a vending machine. Ordinarily that wouldn’t have been an issue at all, but eventually the goose population grew large enough that one of the gangs decided to annex it. Being territorial little shits, they would harass the poor flamingos any time they strayed within ten feet of it. The flamingos tolerated this for years until one day they snapped collectively. Here’s a summary of the incident in chronological order.
1.) It was a hot day, so everyone in question both human and avian, were cranky by the time the zoo even opened. 2.) A few flamingos (let’s call them The Jets) strayed into the radius of the vending machine and were immediately confronted by the indignant hissing geese (The Sharks) 3.) Possibly due to heat and the simple fact that the geese had been giant douchebags for far too long, the flamingos decided fuck it, this time they were going to FIGHT BACK DAMMIT, and swarmed the geese en mass. 4.) Chaos ensued. The geese were outnumbered 4 to 1 but had the advantage of being able to scream for back-up. 5.) Hearing the shrieking Canada geese and the bellowing of the enraged flamingos, the peacocks came to the conclusion that the apocalypse had come upon them and began to gather in the surrounding trees in droves and wail in despair. Or cheer them on, whichever. 6.) NOISE 7.) Apparently one of the siege tactics employed by the geese is to shit explosively all over the sidewalks. Never in the grass. 8.) The geese, having secured reinforcements from all over the zoo, went berserk and proceeded to attack EVERYBODY who had come to watch be they human or otherwise. 9.) The flamingos were chasing/being chased by the geese through the crowd accompanied by cheers/wails from the peacocks in the box seats. 10.) Complete pandemonium when the zoo tram became stalled on the tracks by the flamingo pond due to battling birds. The Jets, sensing these were somehow reinforcements on the side of the Sharks, charged the tram. Adults were doing the duck and cover. So were the ducks. Small children were screaming, adding to the noise. People were slipping on goose shit and hitting the ground in the fetal position, only to be stampeded by the rampaging flamingos. 11.) The koi continued to bloop hopefully for food. 12.) Two of the geese were cornered by a rival gang of their own and were chased into the swan pond. Cue slow-motion. 13.) The swans detected an enemy presence in their territory and by god, SOMEBODY was going to PAY. 14.) The staff were having no luck in breaking up the fight and on the verge of giving up and just building another zoo elsewhere when the hellbirds stormed the battlefield, trumpeting battle-cries, to dispense feathered justice. The staff promptly dropped their brooms and fled. 15.) The uprising was squashed in less than two minutes. Number of casualties was unknown, feathers were flying everywhere and there was enough goose shit to build another bird. One staff member had been knocked to the ground and was left with a melon sized bruise courtesy of one of the hellbirds. Several children were traumatized, probably for life. The zoo eventually removed the vending machine by the flamingos.
The geese went back to being giant douchebags. Because geese.
birds ❤
I fucking can’t wait to get geese I’m so excited
all this shows is that swans AKA Hellbirds are basically the avian equivalent of tactical nuclear strikes
ruby-dear archive 