Birds get away with everything.

in Random Crap

I wonder if birds ever hear songs on the radio and then chirp those songs and then the other birds are like, “OMG, FRANK.  THAT SONG IS AMAZING.  I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU CAME UP WITH THAT YOURSELF” and then Frank is like, ‘I’m glad I’m a bird and can’t talk so there’s no reason to let everyone know that I didn’t make this song up myself” and then later the other birds hear “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” on a radio and they’re like, “WHOA.  EVEN THE HUMANS ARE SINGING FRANK’S SONG NOW.  WTF.”  And then Frank becomes the most popular bird ever even though he’s totally a poser.

Slightly related:  Yesterday there was a bird outside and he looked hungry so I tossed him a bit of my scrambled egg and after he ate it I realized that eggs come from birds (and vice versa) and so I may have just forced a bird into cannibalism.

PS. For the first time since Sunday I feel mostly human and can sit upright for more than 15 minutes at a time.  CELEBRATE THE SMALL THINGS, Y’ALL.

PPS. I was watching bird videos on youtube and now Hunter S. Thomcat is convinced there is a bird inside my computer:

PPPS.  This was the video that sent him over the top:

PPPPS.  As requested, HST dance remix here.

145 thoughts on “Birds get away with everything.”

Read comments below or add one.

  3. OMG I think I’m a cat. And I can’t stop bobbing my head up and down.

    Not blaming you exactly, but u know… there should have been a trigger warning in there or something 😉

  4. Yay for being able to sit upright! Boo for asshole birds. For the most part, other than our geese, the local birds here are not very assholish – something to be thankful for as well!

  7. lol! I don’t know you, but I love you. Your blogs are just the best and I am so glad you share your innermost conversations with the world!

  9. You’re fine (re: egg to bird). Birds eat other birds, and other birds eggs all the time. As long as it was the egg of the bird you were throwing it to…

  10. Unless the bird was a chicken, it wasn’t cannibalism, any more than when I eat a cute puppy. Er, not that I eat puppies. Just an example.

  12. It’s like how in What the Health the hog farmers take the dead hogs and grind them up and feed them to the live hogs…..watch out….that bird might get mad bird disease or whatever the equivalent of mad cow disease is!

  13. They’re like ventriloquists. Their beaks are rigid while they belt out a song like “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.”
    Thanks for this. I had a hell of a morning. Spent days on a post (linked below) that didn’t show up in the WP Reader. That’s why we need you, Bloggess!

  19. Glad you’re doing better. I suppose Hunter S. Thomcat’s new YouTube addiction isn’t really too bad so long as he doesn’t pounce on the screen. Your poor computer has been through enough recently.

  20. I laughed so hard at the owl video I choked on my own spit and now I’m sharing this video to everyone who tells me they are having a bad day. And Hunter S Thomcat is adorable. I hope you feel better soon! Lots of love and healing thoughts being sent your way!

  22. Lmaooof! Just another creature for me to be scared of, because really, who wants to get their face ripped off? Glad you’re feeling better.

  23. Totally non related but went to Legoland in Dallas.Saw James Garfield in legos.

    (I need pictures. ~ Jenny)

  24. I am so very, very glad you are feeling a little better!

    Indeed, always celebrate the small things. That is what life is made of, and my motto is DON’T EVER PASS UP AN OPPORTUNITY TO LAUGH. You give me many opportunities, Jenny, and I thank you ever so much. Keep feeling better and better! Much love to you…
    (and the photo of Humter S Thomcat staring at the computer is great!)

  27. OMG, I love the True Facts videos. The one about sloths is my all time favorite! You’ve gotta watch it!

  29. My cat caught a Magpie the other day but it wriggled free. The next day it came back with 6 friends and I had to rescue Izzie. She said “Fuck You!!” as I was carrying her back into the house. :o)

  30. Reminds me of when my then-4yo daughter was prepping scraps for the neighbor’s chickens, and there was a bit of leftover chicken nugget and she said, “Mom, would the chickens eat… chicken?” and we both stared at one another in the realization of what she’d asked, then decided not to. Later, I was told that chickens will ABSOLUTELY eat chicken, so. Go figure.

  32. Glad you’re feeling better. I have a parakeet and they sell bird seed fortified with egg in it. It does freak me out but I have to remember that eggs are their first food, which is bizarre if you think about it. I had a horse that would eat dog food. Go figure.

  34. Birds can be such assholes. Don’t worry, he was probably a cannibal already. You just can never tell with birds.
    Dig, Hunter! Get that Owl!!

    Also, that is my favorite Owl video!!

    E

  35. Miss awesome Jenny Lawson I have only known of you for two weeks because of your book that I came across (it was a twisted meant to be story). For the last couple days I have felt less human but you have made me feel less alone. So far thank you for everything you’ve done and everything you’ll continue to do.

  36. I tried the owl video on my cat…he paid no attention whoch makes me think he is stupid which i already suspected since he likes to hump a golf club cover shaped like an eagle.

  37. The sparrows and pigeons here in Baltimore fight over fried chicken wings. That’s cringe-worthy entertainment.

  38. H.S. Thomcat looks like he’s doing Duchess’s dance from “Everybody Wants To Be A Cat” from The Aristocats.

  39. When we put bird/squirrel videos on, our cats try to get inside the TV to get at them. And when we watch one of lions or cheetahs hunting, one of ours is glued to the screen – if she could write she’d be taking notes. Haven’t had the heart to tell her how big lions, zebras and Cape buffalo actually are.
    The bird and egg set off a flashback to a Far Side cartoon – a chicken is in bed with a thermometer in his beak and an ice bag on his head, and his wife (presumably) is holding a tray with a steaming bowl and saying something like, “Eat it, you’ll feel better. Besides, it wasn’t anyone we knew.”
    Glad you’re feeling better, and I hope you didn’t have to eat anyone you knew.

  40. Oh man, that was the best video I’ve seen in a very long time! As an “ape of the hamburger” who has always been terrified of birds I have to agree with the poignant advice given in that most wonderfully translated German fairy tale “don’t do drugs because an owl might just rip your face off”… You never fail to impress me with the weirdness you find!
    Oh and YAY for small victories!

  42. My owl story: one Sunday we arrived at church really early and found an owl in the library. After soothing and talking to it for awhile, we finally decided to open a window and he flew out. The crazy thing is that the only way he could have entered was an open window in the basement 2 floors below. So he must have flown up two flights of stairs.

    Glad to know you’re on the mend, Jenny.

  43. At first I thought Hunter S. Thomcat had invented a new kitty dance – I was in awe and slightly disturbed. Then the angle changed and I could see he was just pawing at the screen. Whew.

  48. Can you whistle “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go?” I’m trying and it sounds weird… also, now my dogs think I’m even weirder than they usually do. Which is pretty damned ungrateful of them, considering I’m just back from shopping for a new fence for them. Damned ungrateful mutts. They’re not getting any bacon later, that’s for sure.

  49. Chickens will definitely eat chicken. I checked. Ummm, for a friend, obviously. Then again, chickens will also eat dog shit, so I’m pretty sure that means they’ll eat anything.

    Is it just me, or is Hunter S Thomcat actually twerking at the start of that video?

  50. Digging Hunter S. Tomcat’s kitty dance moves! Glad you are feeling a bit better 🙂

  52. I feel like I would’ve done better in biology if we’d had documentaries like that.

  53. your cats have the best names! you could literally start a business where you tell people the best name for their pets

  55. That video was brilliant!
    Whenever I watch animal videos, my cat will completely freak out, and if close my door, she will patiently wait outside, and when I let her back in she won’t leave my side.
    (I do this whenever she ignores me (Highly effective))

  57. That owl video is a hoot! (so to speak) Thank you for sharing.
    Glad you’re upright in greater-than-quarter-hour increments. Keep up the good work!

  61. Glad that you’re kind of feeling better 🙂
    Ps. Birds are murderous beast, especially swans, who just happens to be Denmark’s national birds (That is in fact where I come from, sorry if my grammar sucks)
    You can’t take a walk along a lake, without constantly being afraid, that some swans might come and bite off your toe.

  62. Glad you are feeling better and thanks for introducing us to that youtube channel. Very funny

  63. Hunter reminds me of the old days of VHS. We had a tape called Video Catnip. We’d play it on the giant not at all flat TV and the cats would sit on top of it and hunt the birds and squirrels absolutely convinced that one of them would come out the side or back.

    It never happened but it was SO much fun to observe.

  64. I wish I could hang out with you. In a friendly, nonobtrusive, but helpful if needed fashion, please don’t call the cops. Even when you are feeling like recycled bird food you are still finding the most awesome videos, hypnotizing your cat, and postulating about Frank’s potential case against Wham! for plagiarism. I am barely holding onto oatmeal and looking forward to getting scoped tomorrow. (Down the hatch not up the trap door.) I have a high throat pucker factor just thinking about it so the laughter you gave me forced my lips to open and smile. (Honestly, I have the worst gag reflex in the world. It’s almost cause for divorce. I can’t imagine what tomorrow will do to me.)

  65. It’s fine. Chicken eggs usually aren’t fertilized, and egg yolk is literally baby bird food. Doesn’t make the bird a cannibal any more than drinking milk makes you a cannibal.

  68. As someone who is involved in parrot rescue, I tell people that feeding parrots chicken is as close to cannibalism as a human eating a cow. I’m not sure how closely related chickens are to backyard birds, though.

  69. As someone who is involved in parrot rescue, I tell people that feeding parrots chicken is as close to cannibalism as a human eating a cow. I’m not sure how closely related chickens are to backyard birds, though.

  70. I know someone who raises chickens (for the eggs), and feeds them…chicken eggs! As someone above pointed out, it is their first food, but ewww.

  71. No worries about the eggs/cannibalism. Our chickens are jerks and sometimes eat their own eggs, so you didn’t start some freaky sub-species of egg-eating birds–they already do it. Don’t you feel better already??!

  74. Where the hell do you find these, Jenny? No matter. I’m sharing this on on Facebook. Because we really need a counterpoint to all the depressing stuff on Facebook.

  75. Thanks for the video. It was hysterical to me.
    “If silence were loudness, they would be the loudest flying bird……”
    If being poor were richness, I would be the richest….
    If being a curvy girl were skinniness, I would be the skinniest…
    If being ridiculous was intelligent, I would be the smartest…
    I can’t stop…..
    Laughing is the best.
    🙂

  76. Glad you’re feeling better! About the cannibalism thing, relax, some birds do eat other birds eggs. Cross it off your list. 😊

  77. Ze Frank! I miss Ze. Thanks for reminding me he has videos out there that I should re-watch.

  78. I have a crow in a box on my porch. His name is Edgar Allen Crow. It’s a long story. He’s getting better, I think. He’s been calling out to his fam all day, and they are calling back to him. I had him in the back, but then his homies were fussing at my dog, and the dog was howling back at them, and then I was like, “Hey! I’m trying to WORK, here!”, and moved him to the front porch to stop the dog-crow wars. So, hopefully he will get ALL better in a few days (or tomorrow) and be able to go back to his tree.

  80. I love Ze Frank. It’s been too long. Thank you.
    Glad there’s been some improvement.

  82. “Try riding a bicycle at night, and picking up a moving burrito with your feet, based on the sound that it makes.”

  83. That owl video is freakin’ hilarious! Yay for bird videos and for the true appreciation that only cats can express through their intense laser focus.

  85. This is my favorite blog post of yours. Blog was autocorrected to blood and that was kinda weird.

  88. I used to work at a zoo with birds-part of their daily diet was a chopped up hard boiled egg! It always felt slightly weird, but they didn’t seem to have any ethical quandaries.

  89. That owl video is a gem. Thanks for sharing.

    Glad you’re on the mend. Question, though… are we SUPPOSED to be able to be upright for 15+ minutes at a time? Is that really optimal? I distinctly remember a friend of mine once saying ‘you can’t fall off the floor’, so I tend to try to stay as horizontal as possible, but maybe I’m doing it wrong.

  92. Well, when I was little, back in the olden days, we had this big old furniture-like radio. I was convinced that the speakers and stuff in the back (very mysterious) were a land full of tiny people with big voices and all kinds of talent. Tell Hunter that I sympathize and also that in all the intervening years no one ever let me take the radio apart, so there is NO way to prove that I was wrong. He can take hope.

  93. Hunter dancing is priceless! So glad you’re up and moving, every victory counts.

  94. The birds in my neighborhood are early risers and love to sing at the top of their little gullets at the first light of day. I am working on revenge by roosting in an oak tree, crowing and singing an hour before they awaken to give them a taste of their own medicine. Tomorrow I’m going to throw eggs at them. Thanks for the idea.

  95. Cynthia here. First – so glad you’re feeling better. Second – my love to Hunter S. Tomcat and you too, and third, that is a hilarious bird video. A little umm gross at times but mostly a huge lol. Thank you for sharing it and thank you for you!

  96. I have a macaw that eats chicken. and turkey. and scrambled eggs.

    and chases the dogs around the house.

  97. The TRUE FACTS series is AMAZING…don’t miss the one about Fruit Bats. Hilarious!!!

  98. I have a macaw.. It eats eggs on Sunday Morning along with my husband. I mean, my husband makes the bird and himself eggs, not that the macaw eats my husband (but he’d like to).

  99. As long as you were eating chicken eggs and the bird was not a chicken, it’s not strictly cannibalism. After all, most fish eat other varieties of fish. Of course, they don’t recommend that we eat any other ape because of nasty diseases, so I’m not sure exactly how that works for them.

  100. We had a dog who loved to watch football on TV. I always wondered if she wondered where the people went when the game was over.
    So glad you are feeling better
    Sending more healing energy to you.

  101. Well, I for one am doing drugs with the hopes that an owl will rip my face off, or well, it will TRY!

  102. The bird eating scrambled eggs is no more cannibal than you are when you eat a steak. Unless it was a chicken eating a chicken egg.

  104. Birds are cannibals, chickens will eat other chickens if you give them the chance.

  106. My Cockatoo loves chicken bones. He cracks them and scoops the marrow out. A lot of birds actually need protein, and many are scavengers. Roadrunners will eat anything! Snakes, lizards, mice, bugs, baby birds, etc. When it comes to survival, animals don’t have a moral code. I think that there are even human tribes in Papua New Guinea that actually eat their deceased loved one’s brain in honor of them or some such. Needless to say, they end up with a degenerative brain disease kinda like mad cow.

  108. our chickens eat eggs and also chicken when we throw out the leftovers, so yes, they are cannibals (truth-they’d eat anything you feed them!)

  110. Glad you’re feeling a bit better. This message has been handcrafted out of I internet hugs and glue. But not glitter as it turns out that glitter is evil now.

  111. Does cannibalism count if the bird and egg were different types of birds? Like birds of prey eat smaller birds…Regardless, I’m sure that that’s not exactly what Paul Simon meant as the “Mother and Child Reunion.”

  114. I’ve had a healing since watching the owl vid and I didn’t know I needed one! And HST can sure get a shimmy on.
    So, now that you’ve yakked up your own pellet of Brazil nuts and bones, I will picture you enjoying the outdoors whilst I go back to fixating on your resurrected book(s).
    Because, you said, book(s). And I need to follow suit and go work on mine.

  115. How did you find that Owl video! Hysterical!!! I clicked on it, and immediately my coworker started cracking up and asked what I was watching…

  117. Awesome that you’re feeling better! Thank you for posting the owl video. I had forgotten about the True Facts series. That guy is freaking hilarious! Go watch all of them and laugh until your belly hurts.

  118. cinnamon toast crunch has been promoting cannibalism for a while now so I say play thru.

  119. I recently had a bird outside my window that would not shut up, day or night. Probably 1000 feet from my bedroom. Chirp, chirp, chirp. Incessant. Happiest bird in the world. Everything was a song. It reminded me of one of those car alarms that changed pitch and tune, but not volume, every few minutes.

    I loved that bird.

    Maybe it’ll come back next spring.

    Congrats on feeling better. Sing like bird every day. 🙂

  120. Ze Frank is AWESOME! love his videos, they give me absolute fits of giggles

  121. when you di[ chicken in eggs before bread crumbs you are dipping that chicken into the bodies of their murdered children

  123. Glad you’re starting to feel a bit better. Chronic illness sucks! So, when I had zebra finches and they’d lay eggs one of them would always smash and eat the eggs. So is that extreme birth control? Cannibalism? Ultimate infanticide? Bird-brain-didn’t-even-know-it-was-their-own-eggs? Who knows…

    (BTW- was given Furiously Happy to read while healing from surgery and LOVED IT! So, then I read Let’s Pretend This Never Happened and LOVED IT! So, looking forward to your next book and enjoying your blog. Thanks for you!)

  124. Glad you’re feeling a bit better! So, when I had 2 zebra finches and the girl would lay eggs, one (or both) of them would inevitably smash and eat the eggs. So, extreme birth control? Infanticide? Just birds with bird brains? Who knows?

  128. I haven’t had many spoons lately either Jenny. Keep fighting because depression lies.

  130. So here’s a quick nerd alert: most birds don’t have a lot of range in their chirps–they do the exact same pattern at the same pitch as other birds of their species. If you record bird song and pitch it up even a quarter step (not even a full piano key away), th bird will not recognize the tweet as it’s own because they have perfect pitch. This is a consolation for classical musicians in training, who are often thwarted by kids with perfect pitch. Turns out relative pitch is actually the more sophisticated evolutionary mechanism!

  134. Actually birds eat egg shells and it’s very good for them to replace what’s lost when reproducing. There are even biscuits to give them during their s time to help them. As they’re unfertilised, it’s just nutrients for them like us. So you’re good. It does sound weird but it’s normal. 😉👍🏻

  135. Our mockingbirds regularly sing car alarm sounds. We are looking forward to the day he adds Pokemon to his repertoire.

  138. Sweet Jeebus. I’ve already forgotten what I was going to say. I scrolled through the comments and now my brain is completely blank. Hold up. Let me go back a SECOND time to refresh my memory. Ah! Got it. I wonder if birds ever sing songs that annoy other birds, like, “C’mon, Frank– Not Copa Cabana again. That’ll get stuck in my head for the next week! Seriously. How about some Sia or a nice JT tune, huh?”

  139. I LOVE the “True Facts” videos. The one about sloths is what hooked me. say goodbye to your afternoon and go down the rabbit hole watching them. Except for the one about ducks. I am serious; he ruined ducks for me.

  140. This was one of the first things I read this morning and it was the greatest way to start my day. I’m going to be thinking about this ALL DAMN DAY NOW.

  141. I had a cockatiel that insisted on eating scramble eggs from my plate for years. One time he was sitting on my shoulder while I was cooking the eggs and he flew into the frying pan. Jerk! I always thought about that cannibalism thing as well.

  142. I hate it when owls rip my face off. So rude. Go Hunter S. Thomcat!!! Tear through that monitor and save the world from nasty earred creatures who rip faces off people!!

  143. zFrank is the absolute best. I have lost a few hours watching his videos. My husband forces other people to watch them. Some of my favorite wasted hours on the internet. 🙂

  144. I’m not sure if I already commented on this but I just watched the owl video and the dance remix and LOL! I was not thinking that owl video was going to be funny. 😀 Thank you for that. And great choice for the dance remix.

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