God I love a question that requires no research. But stop spelling “favourite” like you’re a British person. You grew up in Maryland. Write American.
Favorites and unfavorites are tricky things, though. My affinities change every 10 minutes. Some days I love great blue herons. Some days I’m like, ugh, so basic. Cormorants, brown pelicans, northern mockingbirds – same.
I don’t think I have any active animus toward any species, largely because nearly all of them can fly and I can’t. (Penguins can’t fly, but they commit acts of hilarity whilst dressed in formal wear their entire lives, so they get a pass. Emus and ostriches can’t fly either, but they will rough you up if they catch you talking smack about them.)
I’m going to say my least favorite bird is the Eurasian collared-dove, an exotic species that seems designed by committee to neither offend nor thrill. Some people say their plumage is as vibrantly colored as oatmeal, but careful observers will note that it actually ranges into tones of beige, taupe, khaki and ecru. They have a pathetic little mewling call they make whenever they come in to land. And they sometimes bully more aesthetically pleasing mourning doves at the feeder.
I mean, I don’t dislike Eurasian collared-doves. I just have less enthusiasm for them.
I’d have to say my default favorite is the magnificent frigatebird. I love that they are pelagic birds and spend most of their life flying over the ocean, despite the fact that they can’t swim or get very wet, meaning they have to fly low and snag their meals with their bills from the top four or five inches of the water. Or beat up other birds, usually terns, for their food. Also, look at them. They are just gorgeous, the cool club kids of ocean dependent avifauna.
But frigatebirds get temporarily replaced in the Favorite Bird category, depending on what I’m looking at. Peregrine falcons, painted bunting, purple gallinules, barn swallows, rose breasted grosbeaks to name a few birds that often steal my fancy. But I’m always going to come back to frigatebirds.
Why does the Cuban finch come to Florida if it’s native to Cuba?
– The Fleming Street Rooster
Knock it off, Beau. Also, I can’t believe your bocce team had new shirts for the first game of the season. I’m on the second season of playing on my team and still no shirt.
Is it more effective to shoot a bird with both middle fingers, or to do it with just one while still holding onto the steering wheel?
— Florida Man Man
I grew up in New Jersey, which makes me a classicist when it comes to shooting a/the bird. And I’m going to stick with what they taught us in driver’s ed, which is that it’s important to keep one hand on the wheel for safety as you flip off the object of your disdain. It seems less efficient but is also actually easier and safer to hold the steering wheel with your left hand and do a cross body flip off with your right. Also, the advanced move they taught us in Jersey AP driver’s ed was to keep your eyes forward doing the initial flip off, then slowly turn and make eye contact with the flipped-off person, look at them for a count of three with a neutral expression, then return your gaze forward whilst keeping your central digit in its elevated position.
Florida needs to do better when it comes to educating their drivers. It’s just all inchoate directional gesturing in these parts. Too much swerving on the road.
Pro tip: In Florida, where there is often so much glare, it is often a good idea to roll down the window to make sure people see your emphatic gestures.
Do Cuban finches use the Southernmost Point buoy as an official GPS waypoint? If so, have you noticed a localized drop in the Cuban finch population since the buoy was temporarily relocated?
– Anonymous on Boca Chica
Listen, Danette, I know what you’re up to here. And I’m not having it. Cuban finches were not affected by the temporary Southernmost Point buoy relocation because Cuban finches do not exist. You know this.
How do birds choose the leader of their flock? Do they hold elections?
– Jay Hall
Depends on what type of flock you’re talking about. Birds like Eurasian starlings, who tend to gather in the biggest flocks, and who do that murmuration thing everybody loves so much, don’t actually have leaders. They lead by consensus. If you look through your back issues of the journal PLOS Computational Biology, specifically the Jan. 31, 2013 issue, you’ll see that all those magical looking, swirling clouds of birds just make it up as they go along. The basic mechanism of it all is that individuals pay attention to, and take their cues from, the seven birds that surround them. And those interlaced groups of seven are amazingly good at communicating directional moves across the flock. One article I read compared it to a game of telephone where the message doesn’t get garbled in transit. It’s one of the many phenomena in the universe that doesn’t seem like it should work but does.
Birds like geese and ibis are thought to communicate in the same way, but no one is sure about that. The one thing I always think about when I see a giant v-shaped flock of birds, having watched a lot of Tours de France, where riders called domestics ride to protect their team leader from the wind, is that the bird in front is probably not in charge. The bird in front is probably putting out 20% to 30% more energy than the trailing birds, and leaders generally don’t do the grunt work.
How many dirty-sounding bird names are there and will Mandy allow you to print them in the newspaper?
– Totally Not Your Wife
I’m pretty sure Mandy is going to be wiped out from covering the election and may not even read this before it goes to print.
Let’s start with the fact that the word for male chicken and human male genitalia are the same in, like, 19 different languages. And the fact that the word rooster was a euphemism first used by American puritans who were uncomfortable with that. And that the British Victorians appropriated the word rooster to mask their discomfort.
There is a whole family of birds called shags, the most egregious of which is the blue-eyed shag. Close second is the New Zealand shag, once known as the rough-faced shag.
There are just so many members of the tit family, but my favorites are great tit, fire-capped tit, crested tit, penduline tit, elegant tit, varied tit, dusky tit, as well as the anatomically confusing yellow-cheeked tit and the scary sounding ash-breasted tit-tyrant.
Dickcissel, Andean cock-of-the-rock, Guianan cock-of-the-rock, American woodcock, and both hairy and downy woodpeckers.
In local waters we are regularly visited by brown boobies and the more discreet masked boobies.
Clapper rail could be taken the wrong way, as could snoring rail, reunion rail, and little wood-rail
There is the streaky-breasted flufftail, the hoary puffleg, the buff-thighed puffleg, and red-shafted flicker.
I’m going to quit here, before we get to the swallows.
