Birds aren’t monsters. Then again, maybe?
Every mammal, fish, or insect has the ability to stimulate our imaginations—I’ll give animalia that. But birds, something special about them has the ability to tap into the darker depths of our creative core. Maybe because so many bird species can fly. Maybe because they make so many strange sounds. Sing me your Super Mario video game song, mister black-throated sparrow. Maybe it’s because birds come in all shapes and sizes, small as a bumble bee, or can weigh half a motorcycle, some tall as a towering grizzly. Maybe because they’re everywhere, and like most things, we can try to ignore them, that is until that pesky mockingbird cycles through five different renditions of your neighborhood car alarms and beep-locks.
But there’s something else—birds represent mysterious windows to a past when many strange creatures inhabited the planet. Why else would people make constant quips about birds being dinosaurs? Aren’t they? And if dinosaurs are monsters, then we’ve half convinced ourselves that birds are . . . monsters too. Makes me wonder if this is why some people say, or joke (I can’t ever tell) that birds aren’t real? Which is silly. We need birds. Can I get an amen for hummingbird pollinators? How about our threatened western snowy plover chicks—the cutest puffball you could ever see. We need those shorebirds. They help facilitate the transfer of nutrients along our coastlines. Nothing monstrous in that, unless you’re a tiny sand crab seeing kaiju-plover coming your way.
I love our feathered pals. My novel The Deading is part homage to birds, to their very mysterious nature, and so I’ve crafted them as warning mechanisms, killers and gory scavengers, even as curious extensions of the self, probes in the dark, each one seeking out hidden monstrous beings. We can enter a bird’s point of view, creep up on dangers, maybe see in a way we couldn’t have imagined without trying on some passerine eyes.
Birds are not always monstrous when they warn us, but certainly can be monstrous in both appearance and behavior when they do, as in a certain monstrous bird in my next novel Ten Sleep (2025). A larger-than-normal bird could maybe warn you by doing something scary, like hauling off a coyote or something even larger while you’re out in the middle of nowhere, Wyoming. That’s a hefty bird right there. Sure that you even saw what you think you saw? Sure that bird is gonna be the scariest thing you find out there?
Look, no one wants Rodan soaring above their city as a warning—or at least I don’t. Or to find one hiding in a junkyard like in IT, all that colossal Pteranodon power ready to fire up irradiated bird breath and do goodness knows what, even while being a warning. Makes sense that monster, derived from the Latin, monere, meaning, “to warn.” Especially when we marry the word bird to that very idea of that handwriting on the wall, prophecy, or premonition. Birds do make perfect gauges. Canary in a coal mine sort of thing. Large bird carrying away a large dog kind of thing.
Real feathered friends make self-protective choices related to weather, food sources, predators, et cetera. We can observe these behaviors from our living room windows and back yards. Yes, we can learn how to create monsters in our literature just by observation. With a decent pair of binoculars, and some bird identification help, something like The Sibley Guide to Birds, we can watch these little monsters in action, because birds can appear as warnings without even trying, it’s just built right in. Many birds have alert calls in their repertoire of vocalizations. Jays and crows warn other birds when raptors are around. Bushtits have frantic, soft, high, clear tinklings that will let you know if a hawk, owl, or cat is around, maybe even a bullying California scrub jay (I’m in the Western U.S.). Most birds are louder than tiny grey bushtits, and with some careful studying of vocalizations, you can craft a very peculiar and cool bird-monster warning in your story. Makes sense someone might want to craft a warbler flock omen transmogrifying from a loaf of bread that will fly and chatter warnings, or a shadowy and shimmery black-crowned night heron at the end of a road, red eyes piercing the fog, thick long bill open, barking quok . . . quok . . . quok . . . meaning something is on the way, or, you better run. These warnings are monstrous in and of themselves. Don’t forget to wield a crow’s tropey caw caw caw outside a window as a harbinger of who-knows-what [insert random movie or book title].
Birds in lore and mythology (and even current-day cultures) have been healers, warnings, guardians, thieves, grim reapers, devourers of gold, regenerators, God-heads, messengers, child-stealers, man-chompers, and are a mixed bag of deities, monsters, and whatnot. Let’s not forget that birds are gorgeous, strange, can fly or be flightless, can be colorful or drab, foreboding, or cute puffballs, live in every habitat imaginable, and, like humans, can be violent or sweet, and every emotion in between, including distrusting and trusting. They have few bones compared to our 206, usually around twenty-five, and have a heart which proportionately is typically a third larger than ours. Our hearts are about 0.4% of our body weight. A bird—four percent.
Birds can have a physically terrifying appearance, or just do scary things. I’ve had a northern saw-whet owl fly around my head on a dark trail while thousands of spider eyes reflected green from trail foliage. I briefly illuminated the bird—please try not to shine lights on owls—so that I could identify the species. Okay, it was the dark that was the scary part, and the sounds of those wings. Even my headlamp was off at the time. The owl itself, while a bit scary, I now look back on as a cute little wide-eyed monster on a shrub staring at me.
There are some hungry birds at Gold Harbor on South Georgia Island in the South Atlantic Ocean. The hundred-mile-long island is home to a small glacier, snowy winters, and is known for its harsh, inhospitable environment and massive penguin colonies. The sometimes-frozen island boasts a mere twenty people in its Antarctic British Survey research station, and a mountain nearly ten thousand feet high. And yeah, there are some very hungry birds that arrive to one of the remote island’s bays when elephant and fur seal pups are fresh and plentiful.
If you search southern giant petrel on eBird.org, a November 2014 checklist pops up that includes some of the most gruesome bird photos I’ve seen. Birds, monstrous birds, delight in a seal carcass feast while emperor penguins keep their distance and brown skuas watch on. The giant petrels’ heads drip with gore in this orgiastic buffet. Some of the bloody-faced birds face each other, bills wide open as if in mad glee, though more likely territorial displays than Hey, let’s high five to this blood-soaking of our feathers. My favorite image? The plucking of an eye.
This is the stuff from which horror novels are made.
Yet we have to consider those humans in our tales. So, we should consider the guy with the camera amongst the giant petrels. His life wasn’t in danger, was it? He had to be standing over the feast, maybe sometimes on the ground at bird’s eye level right amid the blood splatters. I have to imagine that he made his own blood covenant in this moment, sprinkles of red goo on that lens, showering his boots. Maybe a little dark mantra to their raw feasting. One thing I do know—if that birder had dropped dead? It would be his eye plucked like a chewy delight from a seal corpse. Friend one second, food the next.
How I long to visit the giant petrels.
How I long to create monsters worthy of such joyous scavenger blood baths.
I love birds, slipping into nature most days to observe some kind of their foraging or hunting behaviors. I’ve seen a red-eyed vireo, caterpillar in its bill, smacking its victim left and right against a branch until the thing stops wriggling. And then again for good measure. Seen wrens do the same thing against logs and even curbs. Grasshopper sparrows might play a game of gather the crickets and see how many they can stuff in their bills to take back to their nest. I’ve seen bald eagles tear into ducks and coots, their raw power on full display. There’s one that certainly plays the Grendel of our nearby lake. Their victims don’t suffer . . . much. I’ve seen a peregrine falcon divebomb hordes of sandpipers and come up with a plump sanderling wriggling in its talons. Sometimes they tag-team those little peeps. I’ve seen meadowlarks impaled on barbed wire, even splayed on a fencepost by a loggerhead shrike, a monstrous way to display a kill—this is mine, don’t touch it or this will happen to you. When a recent hurricane came up from Baja and swept inland into California, it brought birds normally only seen fifteen or more out to sea, little storm petrels the size of sparrows. One was recorded at a reservoir in Ventura County, then was recorded being gobbled up by a western gull. Unfair! And while I wish I could visit those giant petrels of faraway islands, there is an elephant seal colony near me ripe with gorefests. Those nature shows are tame compared to the hungry gulls I’ve witnessed. Afterbirths devoured, dead baby seals devoured, including any seals crushed by the big males that steamroll whatever they wanna steamroll.
The more you research bird behaviors, the more you might find something monstery you can use, even if your monster isn’t a bird. How about brood parasitism. That’s when a bird becomes a parasite and relies on others to raise its young. I’ve seen this behavior just recently. A cowbird shows up at a warbler nest, knocks the warbler egg onto the ground—whoopsie—and lays its own egg. Soon, out pops a hatchling already the size of the warbler. Its new parent is tiny in comparison and raises the chick until it’s a fully-fledged chunk of pale brown feathers. Now imagine a monster doing that.
Birds are curious, birds can be unsettling, especially if we see into their true, hungry nature, and wide array of behaviors. They’re wild creatures, and I love them, even the gruesome ones. They can simply be curious, can be our eyes and ears as anthropomorphized extensions of ourselves, and also reflect our own terrible nature, because we’re gruesome too. Either way, let’s take care of bird habitats, let’s take care of birds, we need them to be our monster inspiration and so much more—and they need us.
