The first bird of the year is the Limpkin. I chose this bird because it sounds like a particularly pathetic character from a Charles Dickens novel. Like an extra orphany orphan. I'm imagining a scene wherein the main character is at a poor house and is all "Oose dat in da cohner, den?" and some other orphan is all "Oo, dat? Why, dat's Limpkin, of course. Ee's da saddest of us all" And Limpkin would be wearing part of a newspaper and eating a bread heel, crying.
In actual fact, the Limpkin is a kind of ugly bird from Florida and ughh....below? I was trying to figure out how to best construct that sentence and I think I failed. I was trying to say they also live in a lot of South America and the West Indies. And Mexico. It lives a lot of places. It also doesn't migrate. Boring.
Ughhhh what else. They eat apple snails, which are gross looking. They are really big and have a gross breathing tube and are freaks. They have a door on their shell they can close when they don't want to dry up. Creepy. Creepy little snails. I am glad that they get eaten. Apparently they fucked up rice in Taiwan, too, so fuck em.
The Limpkin's actually pretty boring. It's brown. It doesn't go anywhere. It lives in marshes and swamps, which is also where rapists live. It's a fact. All rapists live in swamps. Ughhhhhhh what else. This bird sounds like it's SCREAMING when it talks. It goes "AAAAAAH! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH! aaaaah aaaaaAAAAAAAHaaaaaa AAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!" Very annoying. One website describes its call as "evocative" but they must mean it "evokes extreme annoyance in Sarah's brain when she is sick and writing bird blogs."
On a more sombre note, the Limpkin is the only member of its family. Tragic. It may seem like a heron or an ibis, but don't be fooled. It is special. Special and alone. Maybe that's why it screams all the time. Maybe we hear "AAAAAAAH! AAAAAAHHHH!" but what it's actually saying is "Holy fuck, where's my family?! WHERE DID THEY GO? FUUUUUCK! I'M ALONE! FUCK! FUUUUUCK!" I feel sad now.
Apparently Limpkins are so tame (read: dumb) that you can just go up to their nests and grab them, so people used to keep them as pets. I woud way rather have a dog though. What the fuck are you supposed to do with a Limpkin? People would come over and you'd have to be like "Look at my boring brown bird. Isn't it cool? It stands around eating snails all day and screaming. Jealous?" and no one would be jealous. No one.
I don't know, this bird's kind of lame. Doesn't seem to have much going for it. Other than the whole being a Charles Dickens thing. I would probably read a classic work of fiction entitled Limpkin, The Screaming Orphan. Maybe not. That actually sounds pretty shitty.
Anyways, sorry for yet another crappy bird. It's not my fault nature is fucking bad at making cool ones. If I was in charge of creating birds, you can bet your fucking ass they'd be rad shit. Like a taco bird?! Dream!
-Sarah Ford
Limpkin. Uggh, boring.
Apple Snails. So fucking gross.
