I’m gonna tell a tale now about boids.\u00a0 Smaht boids.<\/p>\n
Why can’t I ever find that Far Side comic online?\u00a0 You know, the one where the police are gathered around Big Bird’s lifeless body and the detective is examining the bullets on the floor and he says “Bird shot.\u00a0 Big bird shot.”<\/p>\n
I wish I could find it because it’s funny.<\/p>\n
I think this story is funny too, though when it happened to me I wasn’t really laughing.\u00a0 Several years ago, as I was leaving the house and going to catch my bus one summer morning, I noticed 3 crows in my general area.\u00a0 One of them was sitting on the neighbour’s lawn, and the other two were perched on streetlights across the street.\u00a0 And these 3 boids were large, even for crows.<\/p>\n
They were talking amongst themselves.\u00a0 I don’t know what they were saying because I don’t speak Crow.\u00a0 Anyhoo, the one on the lawn looked at me and let out a few LOUD squawks.\u00a0 Feeling in a good mood and a tad rambunctious for a weekday morning, I squawked right back at him.\u00a0 Now for those of you who don’t know me, I have quite a malleable voice.\u00a0 I’m very good at impressions, and this includes the ability to sound pretty damn close to the way a squawking crow sounds.<\/p>\n
And I don’t know what I said to that bird… but he must have gotten something fucking PISSED off.\u00a0 He took to the air, squawking all the while at his compatriots.\u00a0 I thought nothing of it, because that’s kind of what crows do.\u00a0 But then, with all three squawking loudly, they began to take turns at dive-bombing me.<\/p>\n
One of them flew ahead to a streetlight in front of where I was walking, and he swooped down fast aimed directly at my face.\u00a0 He stopped short of hitting me about 12 inches away and flew back up to the streetlight behind me.<\/p>\n
“What the fuck?” I thought.<\/p>\n
Then, a second crow out of those three did the exact same thing to me.\u00a0 He got to that same streetlight, swooped down fast a foot in front of my head, and took off behind me.<\/p>\n
Then the third one did it.\u00a0 Then the first one did it again.\u00a0 I don’t know just how many iterations of this pattern they pulled off, but after the third time it happened I was seriously freaked out.\u00a0 These fucking huge-ass birds had obviously made some spur-of-the-moment plans to fuck my shit up.\u00a0 And they succeeded.\u00a0 That’s teamwork.<\/p>\n
I quickened my pace, but being aware that these animals were trying to show me how displeased they were with my behaviour toward them, I took a gamble on a psychological bluff.\u00a0 I just tried to look calm and tried to ignore them.<\/p>\n
It worked, and they got tired of fucking with my head.\u00a0 But they kept squawking at me.\u00a0 I didn’t look back, but I heard them until I turned the corner 5 houses down.<\/p>\n
I’m pretty sure that had they wanted to injure me, they would have done so on the first attempt…. and they would have swooped me all at once.<\/p>\n
So…<\/p>\n
I learned something that day.\u00a0 Don’t fuck with crows.\u00a0 They’re damn smart and they don’t like putting up with trash talk.\u00a0 And since their talons and beaks can do some pretty nasty damage to our soft and meaty skin, I think we best stick to leaving them alone for the most part.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m gonna tell a tale now about boids.\u00a0 Smaht boids. Why can’t I ever find that Far Side comic online?\u00a0 You know, the one where the police are gathered around Big Bird’s lifeless body and the detective is examining the bullets on the floor and he says “Bird shot.\u00a0 Big bird shot.” I wish I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[301,300,302],"class_list":["post-912","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous","tag-animals","tag-crows","tag-lessons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=912"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":914,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912\/revisions\/914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}