Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
(image ID: a gif of a strawberry cartoon where all of the seeds are replaced with realistic eyes blinking. it uses flat colors with outlines the strawberry is a bright red and the stem and leaves are black with white outlines. end ID)
well, it’s because birds are complex creatures with lots of Emotions that they want you to know about!
see, like many mammals, birds are big team players that have a vested interest in displaying their emotions to other members of their group, like a dog grinning or a cat flicking its ears.
HOWEVER.
you may have noticed this about birds, but their faces are not very mobile, so it’s not like they can just smile at you like some kind of filthy mammal or something whenever they’re happy!
so instead, birds communicate a lot of their emotional state through subtle motions of their eyes.
(staring. they communicate by staring.)
now obviously this varies by species, but enough birds rely on eye contact to get their point across that when they get stared right in the face by a human, they lock eyes with you and go “okay. I can work with this.”
(parrots are particularly notorious for this)
the next time you interact closely with a bird, keep an eye on its little beaky face- you’ll likely see that it’s focused on your face!
eyes, after all, are the windows to the soul.
(and also the windows to if you’re going to attempt to snatch this pigeon off the park bench or not. OOPS, TOO SLOW)
