While it is relatively easy to think about massive, belligerent, hook-jawed, feathered monstrosities like the giant petrel, skua, and lammergeier as being kin to the long-extinct therapod dinosaurs, creatures solidly employed in the “flesh-rending-death-beast” profession, perhaps a little harder to grasp is the notion that commonplace little tweety birds have the capacity to be pint-size brutes. But there are certainly some shining star examples that I’ll outline here.
When I refer to “tweety birds”, I mean birds of the order Passeriformes, which are known as the “songbirds.” Robins, sparrows, meadowlarks, finches, orioles, crows, swallows, wrens….everything from Big Bird to Woodstock….Red Robin to the Arizona Cardinals…all of them are passeriform birds. They are members of by far the most diverse order of birds, and with more than 5,000 species, they are among the most speciose of any vertebrate order. They are distinguished from the other groups of birds by, generally speaking, their exquisite control of the syrinx (a vocal organ that is analogous to our own larynx) to generate elaborate bird songs. They are also notable for being a group of animals that has their evolutionary roots placed in a part of the world that is far more frequently noted for having endemic creatures that do not ever leave; Australia and New Guinea. It’s thought that these little guys first broke off from the rest of the flock roughly 50 to 60 million years ago in this arm of the old southern continent of Gondwana (which was isolated then just as it is today) and somehow exploded onto the world stage, rapidly diversifying and eventually finding themselves in all imaginable locations and habitats.
And it is in Australia that the first entry on this list makes its home.
Johnny Two-tone up there (the one who apparently shares an eye-color with Darth Maul) goes by the name of “Australian magpie” (Cracticus tibicen, if you’re nasty), and it’s easy to see why. The black-and-white ensemble (often referred to as a “pied” coloration) and wedge-shaped beak is dead ringer for the magpie bird that many people from the northern continents are familiar with. However, the two birds are not all that closely related, and the pigmentation pattern is a coincidence of convergent evolution. True magpies are in the crow and jay family (Corvidae) and while they are highly-intelligent and mischievous animals, they aren’t particularly aggressive birds, favoring wiley methods of scavenging and hanging around urban and suburban environments for human food waste. In contrast, the Australian “magpie” is a member of the Artamidae family, which is a group of crow-like birds native to the continent and surrounding islands, and the family is far more closely related to other Australasian, Southeast Asian, and Madagascan birds, like vangas and ioras, than they are to the corvids.
It’s also worth mentioning that the genus to which the Australian magpie belongs, Cracticus, is full of birds collectively known as “butcherbirds.”
So, you know we are off to a good start.
