Life of Birds.gif part 4: Life is Gross

Welcome back to the series exploring, through the art of .gif, the BBC's cracker-jack bird doc from '98, The Life of Birds. Here's a link to the other parts. Today we're going to look at the series low for me, honestly. This episode purports to be about birds eating.

 

So far, so good. But aside from fruit, a lot of the things birds eat are gross. Look, here's a crow poking a maggot in the face with a stick.

Not so glamorous now, is it. It doesn't help that I try to watch these with Mrs. Amateurnithologist, and that she has a thing about bugs. There are a lot of bugs in this episode. These remain ungif'd

We've also got parrots eating a bunch of clay. Like the crow using a simple tool to catch his food this is interesting. The parrots are doing this, by the way, to line their stomachs and protect them from the otherwise poisonous fruit they're eating. It's just not a great visual image.

But frankly it doesn't have to be a gross food to be kinda gross. Sometimes the episode just gets too close for comfort.

Nope, not into it. Gross weird tongue.

And I'm pretty sure no one needed to see this. The other significant problem with this episode for me is that it included a lot of images of things riddled with little holes. That's just something that bothers me for some reason. Between that and the bugs, well, this episode was nearly unwatchable.

Oh, and also this. Yeah, I understand, it's a natural part of eating and digesting. But this episode really had a lot of closeups of birds pooping. Like, more than I think anyone would expect. There is some really great stuff here, and we'll cover that next time, but I had to wade through a pretty prickly cactus patch for you guys on this one.

As always, check out The Youtubes to watch The Life of Birds online yourself, for free!