#5: The Rough Faced Shag

I was taking time out of my busy dirt bag schedule to work on a brand new blog I'm doing with Jesse Pruden (eeeeee!) and decided I should update this fucking cool thing. Here goes!

Rough Faced Shag

This bird name is almost too easy to make fun of, but holy shit! Not only does this bird have an embarrassing common name, its latin name is PHALACROCORAX CARUNCULATUS. How much does that suck? Latin people AND modern people can make fun of this guy. There are too many obvious jokes on just the name front for me to even bother. Please "insert" your own.

Ok, I will make one. Rough Faced Shag sounds like what you call a lumberjack that you totally FUCKED! No wait, it sounds like an ugly guy you totally FUCKED! No, no, it sounds like a burn victim......no, a type of carpet.....no, it's a beard fetish! Somebody stop me! It feels toooooooo good!

Anyways, yeah other than all those SUUUUUUUPER funny jokes I just made (weren't they good and also funny?) this bird looks like it has balls on its face. Balls that are made out of brains. Brain balls. That are orange! So...that sucks. And they are right in front of the bird's eyes, so all they look at all day is tiny little brain balls. That would drive me insane. It's probably really frustrating to constantly teabag oneself. So defeating.

They have these tiny little mohawk kind of things going on atop their heads and a blue ring around their eyes. It makes them look like cyber punks, which I guess is ok, for a bird. According to movies about the FUTURE made in the 1980s (man's most futuristic decade) cyber punks are going to exist FOREVER. Good news for this fucked up looking little dude, hey? Maybe he will be teamed up with a Daryl Hannah type character and wear some sort of modified swimsuit looking thing and actually turn out to be a ROBOT all along and this doesn't really make sense anymore and isn't very funny so I'm going to move on. This is what happens when you get me onto the topic of cyber punks, so I should've known better than to even begin this paragraph.

This bird is also known as the King Shag, which is altogether more impressive sounding than the Rough Faced Shag. Although, it kind of sets you up for disappointment. You google it imagining a tiny crowned treasure and all you get is Ballface. Sad.

I guess this bird isn't tooooo ugly. Just kind of unfortunate looking. I have a thing for weird shit on faces though, so I might just be over sensitive. I also have a thing with googly eyes you should ask me about sometime. This bird is a lot better than a couple other ones which have been showcased in this blog, so I guess it does alright. Because I said so.

Ok I'm tired of this.

SF


See? Brain balls.

#4 The Limpkin

So it's 2009 and I haven't done an entry in this for like, 3 months and fuck you. I am busy. I play a lot of nintendo and sleep all afternoon, not to mention the amount of soup I heat up and then consume. Trife life. Give me a break.

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.

#3: Hoary Redpoll

First off, sorry I haven't updated this in a long time. I was busy having a life and not giving a shit about birds with silly names. How awful of me. I've realized now that ripping your life up by the roots and moving it across the country isn't important. No. Birds are important. Not meeting new people, planning for a career, working towards an enriched future. Birds and their names are what matter.

Which brings us to that little scamp, the Hoary Redpoll.

I don't like this bird. I read about it, I saw it stuffed at the Museum of Nature, I looked at pictures online. I don't like it. It's like a creepy arctic Chickadee. Only the thing about a chickadee is that you can look at it and be like "Oh, a fucking Chickadee. I understand that bird" but with the Hoary Redpoll, I think it'd be more like "Why is that bird ripping out its own feathers?"

They do that. If they get too hot they rip out their feathers. I mean, that's creepy. It's not like if you saw someone walking down the street tearing their hair out you'd think "Oh wow, that guy must be really hot." Apparently this bird grows more feathers than regular birds, because they live where it's cold (in the arctic!) but sometimes they just get too hot and go to town on their plumage.

I listened to a recording of their call online and I almost passed out. It's like.....the shrillest, most invasive trilling I've ever heard. I really think I started blacking out after the 3rd time I listened to it. I can't imagine what a whole group of these fuckers would sound like. Oh wait, I do know what it would sound like. Fucking horrible. We'd all have aneurysms for sure. I mean it. It's a fact that we would all have aneurysms. That's how terrible they sound.

And what sort of name is Hoary Redpoll. One website says they are named "to commemorate Danish botanist Jens Wilken Hornemann" but uhhhhhh the words hoary, red, and poll don't appear anywhere in his name. Maybe he discovered Redpolls? Maybe he was always covered in hoar frost or something? Whatever the case, I'm sure he would've like "The Hornemann Bird" over "The Hoary Redpoll". That sounds like something mean you call a girl when she gets her period for the first time in gym class. I feel bad for that girl. And for that bird.

All in all, this is a creepy bird that makes you feel like throwing up when it talks to you and has a terrible name. Thumbs down on this sad sack. Next time I'll pick a better bird so you don't have to learn about such a crappy part of nature again.

-SF




It looks like it just buried its face into someone's guts. Creepy asshole.

#2 The Red-legged Honeycreeper

Let me make it clear right away; this bird doesn't eat honey or creep around all sneaky. I don't really understand why it's called a honeycreeper? That's like the Hamburgler of birds, which seems an unfair comparison to draw with this little guy. I guess they do eat nectar, which is like honey only not because honey is bee puke and nectar is plant ooze. Oh well. Science doesn't have to make sense for it to work, as long as it's still science.

Red-legged Honeycreepers live in South America and fly around all day having fun and eating nectar and bugs. They tend to live on cocoa and citrus plantations, which is awesome because I would love to live on a chocolate lemon farm. They have super thin beaks they use to draw out nectar. I bet it would be hard to give a BJ with a thin bird beak. I bet it would be hard to give a BJ with any sort of bird mouth. I'm sorry I wrote that.

They live in cups in trees. I mean cup nests. But whenever I read cup nest, I just think of like, a mug from an insurance company or a re-useable slurpee cup. That's not what they look like though. They look like little tubes of cute birds. Also, they occasionally look like wangs and that is very funny. If you get enough wang nests in one tree then it is like a wang tree and oh man. Wang tree? Everybody's dream come true.

The only sad thing about the Red-legged Honeycreeper is that its mortal nemesis is The Ferruginous Pygmy Owl. The owl tricks the honeycreeper by imitating honeycreeper calls and then it eats their face. What a dick! Although, I can see how easy it would be to imitate the honeycreeper. I learned how to do it on the internet (it is kind of like a TSIP sound). Maybe that is where owls learn things these days. The world is changing and that scares me. What if owls learn how to imitate us and we think we're going to a rad party but we're actually just walking into an owl's house who then bites our face off? Awful.

I also watched a video of Red-legged Honeycreepers and fun fact! They love bananas.

-Sarah F.

Red-legged Honeycreeper with a fucked up goo mouth.


Ferruginous Pygmy Bastard Owl

#1: The Rainbow Bee-eater

First, an explanation. I was recently at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and was pleased at their giant room of dead birds. While perusing the selection of magestic corpses, I noticed that a lot of birds have funny names. Like, hilarious names. Some so fucking awesome that I wish I had them as my own.

I've decided to start this blog just so I can point out how great and embarrassing ( for the birds themselves) these names can be. Understand? Fucking awesome. Let's begin:

RAINBOW BEE-EATER
Before I even go into the specifics of this bird, holy fuck! Rainbow Bee-eater? Way to be named after exactly what you are! I love that. I should be named Sleepy Buttface.

Anyways, this is a super adorable bird from Australia that eats bees. Get it? Before they eat a bee, they bash it against a rock to get the stinger out. Brutal. How many of you grab bees, fuck them up, and then eat them? Not many of you. You should feel impressed or at least interested right now.

There are a couple types of bee-eaters (that's the specific family of birds they belong to.) Rainbows are part of the regular, really common ones. There's also bearded bee-eaters. That sounds like something you'd call a crazy person. Another adorable sounding bee-eater is The Little Bee-eater, which also sounds like something you'd call a person you were mad at for eating all your bees. "You goddamned little bee-eater! Get off my bee farm!"

They mate for life and the male brings home dead bees for his mate. Like when your boyfriend brings home one of those dome chickens from Safeway and it makes you super happy. They also lives in holes in the ground, which I can realte to. I live in a hole in the ground.


Anyways, I know most people don't care about funny bird names but go fuck yourself. Don't be pissed because you were named Stephanie or James or Matt or Jessica. I'm sorry your parents gave you a common name. I understand. There were 11 girls with the same name as me in my graduating class. But don't take it out on hilarious birds. Just change your name to Fast Walking Hot dog-eater or Acne Throated Dirt Bag or something else that describes you.

Unless you are lucky enough to have been born rainbow coloured and you eat a lot of bees. Then you can just take Rainbow Bee-eater. I will let you do that.

I am in charge of bird names.

-Sarah F.
Rainbow Bee-eater!

Little Tiny Bee-eater!