With A Characteristic Call Of Yoo WAN Nah FITE, Aptly-named Goading Blue Herons Are Notorious Amongst

With a characteristic call of ‘yoo WAN nah FITE’, aptly-named Goading Blue Herons are notorious amongst experienced birders for their incessant and needlessly provocative behaviour. While novices in the field may misidentify them as Gorgeted Blue Herons due to their belligerent demeanor, they can be easily distinguished by a reluctance to engage in actual combat. That said, The Academy of Bird Sciences advises anyone without adequate self-defense training simply ignore these nuisances on the off-chance they are in fact Gorgeted (or even worse, Gross) Blue Herons

Prized for the soft, marrow-like flesh in its ‘horn’, the Cassowary is native to the forests of Northeastern Australia. These vibrant turkeys live on a diet primarily of fruit which gives their horn-meat a light, delicate flavour reminiscent of the fruits the bird ate in life. Unfortunately, this frugivorous diet also makes their eggs a sweet treat for any feral hogs in the area, so Cassowaries are an endangered species.

Perhaps the most depressed bird in it’s entire clade, the White-Winged Tern lives a life of deep, unending sorrow. Starting from their first breaths as they hatch out of an egg with an unnecessarily-thick shell, this bird must struggle daily with obstacle after seemingly-insurmountable obstacle. Despite an endless litany of bad luck, abuse, and a lack of understanding from other birds, the White-Winged Tern is still able to muster a facade of happiness in order to deflect well-intentioned but ultimately useless advice.

And yet, it moves. No matter how bad things are, no matter how unbearable the pain, this bird continues on. In many cases, it clings to life through the desire to spare friends and family the pain of their loss. Sometimes, it is able to do this long enough for it to find its own reason to keep living. In any event, if you are suffering right now please know that I believe in you. I know how dark and terrible the world can be, but more importantly I know you can survive it. 

I may be simply a weird intern at what I’m increasingly certain is a tax avoidance scam, but I fight my own monsters just to keep waking up in the morning and I know you can too.

250 Follower Giveaway!

Beyond all reason, over 250 accounts are following me which I reckon puts The Academy of Bird Sciences solidly at a whole 100 non-spam followers! In honor of this occasion, I’m going to raffle off some of the infocards the Management forced me to fill out by hand and give to strangers! 

First Prize (1 Available): A full set of ten (10) cards laboriously filled out by yours truly!

Second Prize (2 Available): A set of three (3) cards. I wish I could be whimsical and say they were randomly selected by an adorable budgie hopping upon them, but alas I do not have a bird companion.

Third Prize (3 Available): One (1) card. I really don’t have much else to offer, sorry!

The rules are simple: You have to reblog this post, and you have to send me an ask with your favourite bird or bird-like entity by 8 November 2015. One entry per person, please! Winners are selected randomly, and I am pretty sure I can swing postage worldwide.

Many people are unaware of this, but the Australian Army was once headed by an Emu. This experiment ended in an attempted coup in the early 1930s as over 20.000 heavily-beweaponed emus swept across Western Australia in an effort to reclaim it from the human tribes that had arrived scarcely a century previous. The battles were fierce and largely decisive; while the human remnants of the Army still controlled a pair of Lewis machine guns and a handful of trucks, the emus possessed an innate knowledge of the land and the support of the indigenous peoples. After one full month of bitter fighting, only a handful of emus had been killed despite tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition being expended. Unfortunately, this rousing success was short-lived; while emus are master tacticians they are nowhere near as skilled at firing human-designed weaponry without actual hands and so were forced into retreats and delaying actions. The shelter and medical care of the indigenous peoples were insufficient because the invading humans had spent the last hundred years systematically destroying any and all culture that was not theirs. When the Great Emu War was over, the Aboriginal Australians were punished even more harshly for daring to provide aid for their would-be liberators.

Congratulations to the citizens of Canada for overthrowing the Harper regime! Unfortunately it appears the Canada Goose bioweapon he released over the summer is already displacing the gentler Canadian Goose on migratory routes and nesting sites. Canada Geese currently have no known weaknesses so please be cautious should you encounter one!