Bird-brained
This one is about... birds, surprising nobody
Listen, I'm not going to talk about Fallout: New Vegas every time, but it did spark a thought recently. In the Mojave, most of the animals you encounter are altered somehow. Not that many of the the plants, but every creature is some abomination except for: dogs, coyotes, fish, and ravens. There's something particularly charming about the ravens and the fish--unlike the dogs they can't be interacted with, and the fish in particular are really just decorations within bodies of water. The ravens though.
See, you have a HUD of a type, and friends and enemies are indicated by little pips on a sort of compass-map in the corner of the screen. Yellow (or whatever colour scheme your HUD is) is friends, red is enemies.
[ID: A screenshot of a tumblr post by zooophagous that reads: Bro why did you just become a red dot on the minimap are we cool. It has been tagged #gamewriting. End ID]
Animals show up on the HUD - which makes sense, some animals are agressive, most provide consumables. Fish and ravens both give you nothing, and fish can't be interacted with at all. But the ravens? They show up as friendlies in your HUD, they don't like you to get closer than about 10-15 feet, and they gather around places where there is death, but also can just be seen flying around. It's a delight. I mean, it's also kind of annoying because you will think "oh, one red dot and a bunch of friendlies this will be fine" but it's ravens and they're not going to help you fight the monster, actually.
A friend mentioned once how sometimes he'd be like "man, I wish Pokémon were real, that would be so cool," then would remember animals exist. Even though I grew up very rural, the coolness of animals and bugs wasn't really present for me until I was an adult. I think honestly I just got better at joy. Seeing an animal is a joy. Just another little guy, going about life. Where we live there are two creatures that could be considered annoying, thanks to their voluble nature.
We've crickets, two kinds. One is very cartoon-cute, Jiminy Cricket kinds of fellows. The others are larger and darker and a bit more nasty in design. They're both very loud and both very interested in getting inside our apartment. Even when they're safely corralled outside, there are chunks of the year where their sound is constant and incredibly loud. I didn't grow up around crickets so their noise holds no nostalgia for me, but I've learned to become fond of them and their noise. The other day I opened the front door to go out and one of the big, uglier, crickets waltzed inside as if they'd knocked and been kept waiting. It was a circus, trying to usher them back outside, but I was laughing the whole time.
The San Gabriel Valley has naturalised parrots--specifically the red-masked parakeet. There's quite a lot of them, and the particular flock in our area has a pattern of flight that changes throughout the year as they go between their various areas. This year a couple of the families nested in a palm tree down the block and their squabbles are easily heard. But that doesn't compare to the curtain of sound that descends when the greater flock flies over in the early evening on their way to the group roost. Parrots aren't... the most direct in their flights and there's a lot of inter-flock chatter as they move. You watch pairs rushing to catch up and yelling about it, squads will wheel off in distraction then scramble to rejoin the rest.
One evening last year the sound of the parrots became much more immediate than it ever did, and nearly everyone in our apartment complex stepped outside to see what nonsense was going on. We watched the flapping green mass descend into a neighbour's tree. This wasn't a nesting tree, this was no tree they'd shown interest in before. We were all confused about the group decision. Apparently the group of humans watching the shifting, screaming cloud weren't the only ones unsure of what was going on. Not too long after, the lot of them lifted up and took off again, this time to their proper roosting place.
I imagine there must be people who dislike them and their noise. There are neighbours who put nets over their fruit trees to discourage avian thieves (fair), and when the Metro doors open on a Pasadena station and the shouts of birds spill in, there are eye rolls. But overall, they're part of the soundscape of life here, and they're so silly that any annoyance their momentary discord sows is easily overcome.
There's something there probably, about seeing the little bits of life around you and finding the joy you can from it, but mostly I'm just here for the birds. I will end by noting that although in the ravens in Fallout: New Vegas do turn red on your minimap if they receive melee damage, they never attack the player character (even if the player character is the one who caused the damage), making them much more forgiving than every other creature in the game and actual ravens in the world.
You know, I don't read about birds as much as one would think, me being someone who has "birdportant" as a tag on Tumblr. But, here are two good bird books.
Every Bird a Prince, by Jenn Reese - I'm a big believer in adults taking time to read middle-grade books once in a while. It's nice to have an afternoon read, it's nice to step into a compact story with different stakes. I mean, this book absolutely involves an end of the world as we know it, but it also is very much about seventh grade and the journey of identity at that age. Also: birds. I love when you can tell someone loves a type of animal by how they're written.
The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century, by Kirk Wallace Johnson - There are some annoying things about the tone of this book, but the history of exotic feathers, and the heist itself, are wild and interesting enough that I remained engaged.
Have some birds and creatures.
[ID: A photograph of a group of three crows gathered on a rickety-looking second floor wooden landing. They're hit by the sun while the rest of the stairs and scene are in shadow, their black feathers glossy as they perch on the railing, heads toward each other as if conferring while snacking. Behind them to the left, two crows dig in a neighbouring rain gutter. End ID]
[ID: A photograph of a chaparral scrubland in dim and cloudy light. The area is semi-cultivated, with smaller greener plants in the foreground giving way to olive-green scrubby bush midground, with dark green trees in the back. In the centre of it all is the white-draped shape of a plant protected for winter. The shape of the plant beneath the drape evokes the imagined spectres of draped furniture in the closed-off rooms of an old house. End ID]
[ID: A photograph of trees, buildings and street lights silhouetted against an orange-tinted sunset evenly staining the sky and clouds. Arching across the middle of the image is a horizontal arm holding two stoplights separated by two traffic signs. Each of the stoplights and signs have the silhouette of a single pigeon perched atop them. Nine more little bird shapes stand along the angle between the signs and the street. A little further back, the curve of of a streetlight's mast arm is filled with the tiny-headed shapes of pigeons from end to end. Against the stretched-cotton clouds, a small flock of more birds, presumably pigeons, fly in the direction of the spilling orange sunset. End ID]
Have some links.
- Mel Gillman had a draw-along with Cornell, drawing birds and it's a charming hour of good times and good birds.
- Pseudomorphous calcite (mineral that formed to replace an object), after a bird's nest, over at National Museums of Scotland.
- Tic-Tac-Crow, a game by droqen, over at Itch.io. "This is a little ambient bird garden simulator that evolves as you play. Birds come and go, and in the meantime you can play tic-tac-toe with them." It's cute, the birds have personalities and I remembered I am bad at tic-tac-toe.
- Please scroll down in this paper on The limits of egg recognition to look at the D4 in a nest.
- In cleaning out some old bookmarks I found a 2019 article on crows learning to safely eat cane toads and was delighted to see that, as of October 2023, how they learn the trick is being studied and used to prepare areas that haven't yet had the same influx of toads.
- Wooden Feathers, an (of course) wonderful and wonderfully unsettling short story by Ursula Vernon in Uncanny Magazine.
- Count on Crows by Ian Frazier Doubletake, a much more lighthearted bird story.
Things have stabalised enough in my life now I'm donating eSims when I can, this guide was very helpful, though there are also more traditional donation targets like the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, UNRWA, and Doctors Without Borders.