It has come to my attention that some people do not like all birds. This or that bird is not good, they are saying or thinking or blogging nearly two years ago. But actually, whatever bird they are talking about is good. Birds are good.
Many of my puke colleagues here at Deadspin like to bag on the seagull. “An aggressive trash bird that constantly tries to steal my food,” David Roth calls the seagull. Which: Yes. That does in fact describe the seagull. The mistake is the idea that this makes the seagull bad. At worst, it only makes the seagull less good. When the seagull is menacing David Roth instead of me, it makes the seagull not only good, but great. But the seagull is still good, even when it is having ideas about my cotton candy. It hovers on the wind and it has a cool call and when I hear the sound of seagulls it is because I am at the beach, and being at the beach is good; therefore the seagull is good. You can sit on a bench on the boardwalk and watch the seagulls alert each other to food and then compete for it and you can pick your favorite seagull and root for it to defeat the other seagulls and this is better, by far, than watching the people. The seagull is good.
Likewise some of the dumb buttheads who work here have impolite things to say about the noble pigeon, a smart and hardy bird with neat-o opalescent-type shit going on with the feathers around its neck. “Winged rats,” Laura Wagner called them, and: “Diseased rodents of the air.” Because yes, it is true: Pigeons dine upon human refuse and breed in wild abundance in our cities, and rats also do those things. But what pigeons do not do distinguishes them from rats; the comparison is flattering to pigeons. For example, they do not, so far as I know, infest the dryer duct of my house and build a nest of lint and hair and their own shit inside the duct and give hideous hell-birth to a nightmare spawn of revolting pink wiggly baby rats in this nest inside the duct. Nor do they chew through the foil duct where it meets the dryer and use this hole to explore the interior of my home, so that one night I respond to the sound of scrabbling coming from the laundry nook and find myself looking into the beady black eyes of a disgusting furry pink-tailed horror the size of a small cat. Rats, by contrast, have done that. Eliminate them all, I say. Rats have to chew on things all the time or else their teeth grow forever into long and horrifying sabers, and this fills me with a mix of dread and revulsion so powerful that I can almost see it, like an impenetrable cloud of black smoke filling my vision. Nothing about the pigeon does this. Therefore pigeons are fine.
I understand some people don’t like the Canada goose. That’s just dumb on its face.
What I am getting at here is, birds are good. The birds I have listed here are some of the most controversial birds, and even they are pretty good as animals go. They account for like 0.0000001 percent of the birds; all the rest of the birds are beyond reproach. They’re cool looking and diverse and they sing or squawk or whatever. Penguins are birds; the delicious chicken is a bird; the mighty cassowary is a bird. Birds are good and I’m cool with them. I live in the woods and birds are the best of the woodland creatures that come around my absurd forest dwelling. It’s not close!
In fact, here is a ranking of the woodland creatures, by me, a Grossly Bearded Forest Type:
1) Birds (all)
2) Deer
3) Rabbits are fine I guess
4) A bear that keeps its distance or does cool stuff instead of eating my family
5) Squirrels that have the decency to stick to the trees instead of my attic
6) Being hit by an ATV
7) All others
In conclusion, I’m done with this blog.