Have you noticed this going on?
You’re driving down the road, doing your own thing, and you see a bird. It’s just a little generic bird, sitting in the road. Maybe he’s with a friend or two.
You’re doing 40 on this back road, heading toward this bird. He sees you. Maybe his friends leave, maybe not. But he sits there. Staring at you. As if his little feathery body is even going to leave a mark on your plastic bumper. But he won’t move.
You might tentatively slow down, to give him a chance to take flight. Or, like me, you might have gotten over the idea that these little wretches are doing anything but taunting you, and gun the engine. In either case, at the last possible instant, the little avian takes flight and launches himself off the road.
This is too common. Or, if they’re not already in the road, they lie in wait in the nearby trees to swoop down at your car, like it’s some kind of teenage bird rite of passage. They fling themselves at your speeding car, seemingly without care for their own teeny lives.
Have these creatures somehow adapted to our human global domination? I don’t remember them exhibiting this behavior in my youth. They would scatter when cars would approach. It’s as if they all at once decided that they weren’t going to be afraid. They were going to make a game of it. Is this evolution in a single season?
If so, it’s only a while before humans catch on to their brazen attitudes, and stop caring about their little game. After all, what gave them the idea to be afraid of our cars in the first place? Probably having seen a few of their friends get run into!
I’ve given up caring about birds that don’t know better than to avoid cars on the road. It’s our Darwinian duty to allow the fittest to survive, and these birds aren’t fit.
