It appears as if 2024 is already for the birds.
“These birds were not scared as I honked,” Gomez toldStoryful.
In Gomez’s video — a scene that looks like a modern adaptation ofAlfred Hitchcock’s 1963 horror classicThe Birds —hundreds of dark-colored birds monopolize the shopping center lot in Cypress. The clip shows birds sitting atop cars, above shopping cart holders, inside truck beds, and — perhaps most obstructively — in the middle of the lot itself, preventing cars from moving easily and from shoppers from reaching stories like Ross, Home Goods, and Marshalls. The birds cover a tree in one frame with a few fliers on each branch.
Great-tailed grackles flack to a parking lot in Cypress, Texas, on Jan. 2.Yvone Gomez via Storyful
Yvone Gomez via Storyful
Gomez told Storyful that the birds refused to move for anyone or anything — staying still when cars honked at them and even doing the same when a child screamed at them, too.
The birds were great-tailed grackles, a species common during all seasons in areas of the southern U.S., according to theHouston Audubon.
A stock photo of a great-tailed grackle.Getty
Getty
“They tend to congregate in large flocks and prefer shopping centers and fast-food store parking lots where there’s trash for food and trees or light posts for perching.”
In news that affects many of the birds in the U.S., the American Ornithological Society (AOS) revealed in November that in “an effort to address past wrongs and engage far more people in the enjoyment, protection, and study of birds, it will change all English bird names currently named after people within its geographic jurisdiction.”
The AOS will start changing the English names of American and Canadian birds in 2024. The changes will affect dozens of species, including 70-80 bird species with names tied to humans or “deemed offensive and exclusionary.”
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“There is power in a name, and some English bird names have associations with the past that continue to be exclusionary and harmful today,” Colleen Handel, Ph.D., AOS president and wildlife biologist, said in a release.
“We need a much more inclusive and engaging scientific process that focuses attention on the unique features and beauty of the birds themselves.”
source: people.com
