Review: The Angry Bird
Category: Animals
Author: Rovio
Rating: 22%
The ‘angry bird’ is a species of flightless bird found in a wide variety of habitats. The group is well-known partly for the huge physiological variation of its subspecies, of which five are well-known: the red, blue, yellow, black and white angry bird. The angry bird is identified as distinctive from other species by virtue of the stark ‘eyebrow’ markings that all subspecies share, giving the birds an ‘angry’ appearance. They are also notable in their lack of limbs; unlike most other bird species, they have no wings or legs, although they are feathered. Their nesting habits are unknown, except for the white variety, which lays an explosive egg which is almost as large as itself. In their natural habitat they have only one predator: the green pig. The red angry bird is the national bird of Taiwan.
The angry bird is a very poorly designed animal. The lack of wings is a mistake, rendering the birds effectively flightless, and then there’s the absence of legs to contend with. As I understand it, the birds travel via a kind of hopping motion. There is nothing efficient about that. This is another example of evolution getting complacent, and removing appendages which don’t seem useful at the time. It’s short-sighted.
One of the biggest problems for the wild angry bird is nesting: their eggs are consumed on a regular basis by the ground-dwelling green pig, which feeds on a diet of eggs and watermelons. But honestly, if it wasn’t green pigs, it would be rats, or magpies; ground-dwelling birds are notorious for losing their eggs to terrestrial predators, and this is just a perfect example of why.
That’s not to say that the angry bird has no defence mechanism; most do. In fact, this is another easy way to distinguish between the subspecies. When under stress, a blue angry bird will replicate itself twice, effectively tripling the number of birds present. The yellow bird can perform feats of astonishing speed, the black bird swells and detonates like a bomb, the white bird produces a kind of explosive egg, and the red bird does nothing. They are, in some cases literally, all over the place: exploding is never a useful method of self-defence. Some of the others might work a bit better, but still, my complaint would be that they aren’t built to last. The only reason we don’t know much about these creatures is that they very rarely survive in the wild, let alone in captivity.
For these reasons, the angry bird is also impossible to farm as meat. Because of their obvious attachment to their eggs, keeping them for produce is also unfeasible. Kudos to the angry birds for surviving this long, but I must say I’ve seldom seen a less well-adapted, less useful organism. I can’t think of anything productive to do with these birds; as far as I’m concerned, they might as well all be flung away using some kind of giant catapult.
