5 Crow .gifs for all your Ominous Portension Needs

Boo! Spooked you didn't I? No, not with my 'boo', but you were spooked that your beloved bird blog website (this one) hadn't posted any killer Halloween content yet. Don't worry reader, the website has not been a ghost the whole time, it's alive and well. But at this time of the year it's more like.. undead. That's why we're back at you for the annual spooktacular with some haunted bird .gifs. This year we're focusing on the most dreaded of birds, the crow. Never mind this writer's love of the corvid family, there's nothing we can do for them now, for they've been forever symbologised in pop-culture as signs of misfortune, death, and disaster. Today we present five examples from recent(ish) film in convenient .gif form.

Beetlejuice (1988)
Suggested use: Reaction .gif for negative birding experiences

Jurassic World (2015)
Suggested use: 1) For any conversation that turns to dinosaurs being related to birds 2) Any time you want to say the phrase 'putting my foot down'

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
Suggested use: Road trips

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006)
Suggested use: To show displeasure when someone wakes you up too early or texts you at a time when you're sleeping

Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)
Suggested use: 1) When you're feeling like a style icon 2) A triumphant 'haters can't stop me' moment

Do with these .gifs what you will, dear reader. However, be warned that townsfolk whisper that these .gifs are cursed. MWAHAHAHAHahahahaha ha ha ha

6 Spooky Bird gifs for your Halloween

Think of a creature spookier than a bird. It can't be done, right? Well, directors of horror and suspense have known this for a long time. Images of birds in film are often a stand in for death, doom, and despair. Today we bring you 6 fiendish examples to chill your blood on this, the spookiest of holidays. Use em' on your facebook or play em' at your halloween party. Whatever, I'm not gonna tell you how to live your life.



No discussion of cinematic bird scares would be complete without The Birds. This is probably the only time a movie has actually made people fear our feathered friends, and you can see why in this climactic final attack scene.

I also love this scene from True Detective, in which a mysterious murmuration mystifies Matthew Mcconaughey. Is it a hallucinatory flashback or a sign of potentially supernatural involvement?

Crows and ravens usually get the lions share of the horror bird imagery. Even in otherwise upbeat kids cartoon, We're Back, crows straight up vanish a guy.
 
A crow is also employed in the one actually scare-ifying scene in the otherwise hilarious Wicker Man remake, starring personal hero Nicholas Cage. Hmm.. maybe one day I'll try and write a blog about all the times he's interacted with birds in film. I hope it's more than just this once.

Of course birds are not always used effectively in horror. Who can forget the time Jaden Smith fought a giant bird in After Earth? Oh please let me forget.

And we end where we started, with a movie that has become synonymous with bird attacks, Birdemic: Shock and Terror. If you haven't seen this movie and have any love for awful film, you should probably go watch it now. These birds also have the capacity to explode, FYI. I think we'll leave it there for this week blog fans. Stay safe out there blog fans, and may all your costumes involve birds.

Mountain Chickadee

Welcome back to bird blog's Spooktober special! Today's bird might not be as shockingly scarifying as last week's Turkey Vulture, but you wouldn't know it by the company he keeps-

Ahh! I know, it is pretty terrifying, but try to read on. More than just being a frightening image, this picture raises some haunting questions. A bird on a spooky skull, wow, how did amateurnithologist even get such an awesome Halloween picture? Did he make a deal with the bird devil (presumed to be a goose at this point)? And why is it so mysteriously blurry, is it the spirits of the dead communicating with us from the other side? Or perhaps it was shot through a sliding glass door. Like all the best scary stories, I'm afraid this blog will leave these questions suspiciously unanswered. On with the profile!


Mountain Chickadee
Graeagle, California, USA
Member of the Titmouse and Chickadee Family
§A Dissimulation of Chickadees§

~true bird fact~ Sometimes a bird just doesn't have very many interesting facts about it. My usual sources were full of hopefully worded tidbits, but I like to think everyone involved understood that these details were kind of boring. They make a cap for their nest to keep their eggs warm when they're away! They only need to eat 10 calories per day! Mountain Chickadee Eggs take a week longer to incubate than Black-capped Chickadee Eggs! Wow! The closest I got to a really fascinating thing was that they are colloquially called Cheeseburger Birds, because this is what their call sounds like, Cheese-bur-ger (to an insane person presumably).

Loves rustic DIY projects. Big into Pinterest type stuff
Advocates for her friends a little too enthusiastically without realizing it is not really what they want (ex. Complains about a friend's meal to a waiter when the friend was actually only a little disappointed that they forgot the, i don't know, cornbread, and would have rather just let it be)
Always has a lot of questions for you. Good at keeping up the conversation
Uses the word "discoveries" describe things she has bought

Turkey Vulture

Mwahahaha! Welcome back to Amateurnithologist's Spooktacular Shocktober Birdstravaganza! We continue our exploration of the spookiest birds with a really prized find. That's right, Turkey Vulture is finally joining the blog as I've had a few lucky occasions lately to finally get a good picture of these guys. These two pictures were taken at Mount Diablo (scarily topical!).

What do you think of when you think of spooky birds? Probably owls first (and for good reason, they are heavily connected to the supernatural after all). Perhaps crows? At some point you start to think about the only bird that you ever hear about eating human flesh, the vulture. The Turkey Vulture is the western hemisphere's archetypal scavenger-bird. You might know him better as a Turkey Buzzard, or simply Buzzard. The bird that outlaws are left to in the desert. That guy.

It might not surprise you that we here at bird blog have a different perspective on vultures to offer you. First and foremost, Vultures serve an important purpose and occupy an otherwise empty rung of the avian food chain. In fact, vultures are so important to the ecosystem that on other continents, there are convergently evolved bird that are almost identical. Furthermore, some cultures see the Vulture as a sacred being because of his role in the intersection between life and death. Zoroastrians in India and Tibetan Buddhists are both known to practice "sky burials", in which the dead are left somewhere high up for Vultures to consume them, thus releasing their souls. Great job vultures!

Turkey Vulture aka. Turkey Buzzard aka. aka. Buzzard aka. John Crow aka. Carrion Crow
Cambria, California, USA
Member of the Vulture Family
§A Committee of Vultures§

~true bird fact~ They really are harbingers of death though. Turkey Vultures have an extremely refined sense of smell, assisted by an unusually large 'smell section' in their brains, which allows them to sniff out a special gas emitted by newly dead corpses. Very few birds use their sense of smell for much of anything, but Turkey Vultures can find their food using smell alone.

Meticulously organized. A real bean counter
Appreciates the chance to 'let loose' with coworkers every once in a while
Never showy, but contributes a lot
Knowledge gained through studying and reading a lot, not through innate talent