At one job I had many years ago, a bunch of Canadian geese decided they really liked hanging-out at the employee entrance. They shit all over the place and, if you came within ten yards of them, they’d start snapping at you and loudly chasing after you. Nasty assholes, those Canadians.
A domestic goose wing-knuckled my brother (age 8 or so) so hard in the knee that he was limping for a week. At least with geese, if you’re a full-sized person, facing them aggressively usually works. Swans? Bad news. One around here drowned a guy who was in a boat doing pond maintenance.
In anycase Keas, while fascinating, unique and endangered birds, are still assholes. They eat sheep alive. That’s pretty metal. They also love chewing on rubbery parts of cars. Also metal. And they don’t bother flying unless wherever they’re going is really far away. They prefer to walk and show how much of a dinosaur they are.
A friend took her toddlers to a local pond every day to feed and admire a cute new clutch of ducklings and watch them grow up. But a pukeko found the ducks instead, so the final trip became a nightmare bloodbath as the pukeko snapped the heads off the little fluffy ducklings, leaving them to run around headless trailing gore; while traumatised screaming, tearful kids chased around trying to stop the carnage but falling in the water instead …
Yeah, total assholes. There’s an Attenborough documentary on the birds of New Zealand that’s great, but the kea section is horrifying. They don’t just land on grazing sheep to chew a sheep nugget out of their back and then hop off. They dig up shearwater chicks and gobble them down. They are apex jerks of the bird world,
One year, when the cardinals decided to nest in the mountain laurel by our bedroom window, our toddler son got a chance to watch the wee eggs hatch. Red papa cardinal, brown mama cardinal, those funny fuzzy hatchlings that looked to be about 80% mouth.
A Mexican Jay came and ate all the hatchlings in about 3 minutes flat. The cardinals were half the size of that jay and outmatched. I had to explain the whole “red in tooth and claw” thing to someone who had watched events unfold. Quite an education for all of us.