The Bird Uprising Has Begun as Attacks on Human are On the Rise

Source – More than 250 million of the birds live across North and Central America, and this summer some are feeling extra aggressive toward human neighbors—driving them to change walking routes, wear protective headgear or furiously wave arms above their heads as they jog. …

Many people who have long lived in harmony with the birds have noticed an uptick in their aerial assaults this season. Bird-on-human attacks are growing more common as people encroach on their habitats, says Lori Naumann, information officer at the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. …

Parks departments and natural resource offices across several states also recorded an increase this spring of hawk and wild-turkey attacks.

Crows can turn hostile to protect fledglings. CrowTrax, an interactive online map, tracks their attacks across the world. Anyone can add a crow to the map and tell a story of bird violence.

“Just about everybody has an example of a crow attack,” says Jim O’Leary of Vancouver, British Columbia, who started CrowTrax in 2016 after a crow turned his neighborhood into a war zone, he says.

He has received more than 5,000 reports, with a slight increase this year, but that hasn’t helped him avoid attacks. “The crows don’t look at the website.”

You were right, Hitchcock. Good call by you, makers of the greatest motion picture ever made, “Birdemic: Shock and Terror.” While the rest of you have been filling your backyard bird feeders or tossing seeds to these little winged menaces in the park, those visionary filmmakers recognized those nasty creatures for what they are.

Harbingers of our doom.

It’s time we all accept something I’ve been telling you for years: Nature sucks. Every living thing in it is designed to make life miserable for the top of food chain, namely me. Everything either wants to bite you or peck your eyes out, poison you, prick you, sting you or make you itch. And there’s no worse offender than these nasty, worm-eating, disease-carrying, flying vermin. Please note that I’d like to make an exception for the Bald Eagle, the majestic symbol of our liberty. But I’ve been to Alaska a few times. And the image you get watching a nature film or a patriotic video, of this noble creature soaring high above the pines on some windswept mountain sort of goes out the window the first time you see one picking through a ripped open trash bag. Which you see a lot.

So while we’ve admiring these vicious, tiny-brained, air-to-surface missiles, they’ve been plotting against us like the tiny little dinosaurs they are. They’ve been just waiting for their chance. And the time is now. I figured it was going to come in the form of some sort of avian virus. That the pigeons would kill everyone at Barstool HQ or some place, it would spread back to me eventually, and wipe out our whole species. But it looks like I was only off by a matter of degrees. Now they’re going for a direct attack.

The rest of you can ignore the warning signs. I won’t. I’m going to start eating them, and I don’t mean just chickens and turkeys, either.

I’m building up a tolerance and making crow a regular part of my diet. It’s them or me. You can thank me later.