Misrepresentation of Class Aves

Ever since I mentioned the magpie in the picture of the golden eagle whipping the fox I’ve been thinking about Rachel. She loved magpies, which at first is an odd choice for a beloved bird. Like many members of the noble and misunderstood Corvid family of birds (crows, ravens, jays), it’s associated with a lot of mythology, but none more famous than the rhyme about what number of magpies you see:

One for sorrow,
Two for joy,
Three for a girl,
Four for a boy,
Five for silver,
Six for gold,
And seven for a secret never to be told.

When I told her about that rhyme she’d never heard it before, and she thought the phrase, “One for sorrow, two for joy” was just great. She would just say, “One for sorrow, two for joy” for no reason. She also loved the magpie once she realized that Heckle and Jeckle were not actually crows but magpies. I consistently balked at them being called magpies since little in their appearance reminds one of an actual magpie. Their behavior was also puzzling. In this video they are attempting to sell hair tonic to park animals. An apparently mentally disabled custodian dog, probably a Goodwill hire, attempts to do his job and keep them out of the park. Heckle and Jeckle do frightening things to him.




Rachel also loved Woody Woodpecker, again for aesthetic reasons, despite the fact that he is clearly a deranged bird that doesn’t look like a woodpecker. In this video, he attempts to sneak into a baseball game, neglecting his ability to fly. At about 1:18 he apparently has a brain aneurysm based on the look on his face.

When I showed Sammy both videos he thought they were both clearly influenced by John Steinbork, since the law is represented as an arbitrary power that keeps the working poor out of open places. I looked up John Steinbork but was unable to find what kind of cartoon bird he was.

I fear that bird representation in the media, especially when shown to the children, leads to unrealized expectations and therefore disappointment, and possibly resentment. Does your aunt keep parrots because she was born a horrible person, or because when she realized that her exotic birds would never deliver her colorful cereal in loop-form, she became a horrible person? Does Rex Tugwell shoot doves from his back porch because his mother's uterus was formed from the tears of fallen angels, or because he can't endure the bitterness caused by visiting a farm as a small boy where he hoped to see a former plantation-owning, gigantic rooster attempt to philander with homely hens?

Keep it real, America. Not just for the birds' sake, but ours, too.