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Don’t Make Friends With A Brown-Headed Cowbird

Emily Kingsley
Curated Newsletters
5 min readMay 20, 2020

Life is short. Don’t spend it with parasites.

Photo by ali gh on Unsplash

Is it a cow or is it a bird?

First of all, a brown headed cowbird is a real thing. It’s a bird that’s about the size of a bluejay with a bluish black body and a dark brown head. Since I’ve been working from home, I’ve been watching them through the window next to my desk.

They are good looking and flashy in an understated way with iridescent feathers and a chipper call that sounds like a kid’s toy robot. Despite their harmless appearance though, they are a friend to no one. Cowbirds are selfish and greedy and they pave a path of destruction everywhere they go.

Unfortunately, I’ve met some people who have similar habits. Cowbirds act the way they do thanks to thousands of years of survival of the fittest. Humans who act like cowbirds are a mystery to me, because they do things that we’ve all been taught not to do since we were in Kindergarten.

The Brown Headed Cowbird’s sinister survival strategy

Brown headed cowbirds are brood parasites. This means that they don’t ever build a nest of their own. Instead, female cowbirds sneak into other birds’ nests where they deposit a single egg. Sometimes the cowbirds even poke holes in the eggs that are…

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Emily Kingsley
Emily Kingsley

Written by Emily Kingsley

Always polishing the flip side of the coin. Live updates from the middle class. e.kingsleywhalen@gmail.com. She/her.

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