tiny rage machines
A friend of mine practices bird ringing; bird ringing is when scientists, and others, capture birds and check their legs for bands. If there is a band, they record where they captured the bird, and other things, if there isn't, they put a little band on its leg and record approximate age, location, species, etc. Ringing helps researchers track birds, finding out how far individual birds travel, where they hang out most, how long they live for, all sorts of useful info. If done correctly, it is mostly just annoying to the birds.
here's a bird with a band. from here.
the important thing is of course doing it correctly. Birds are small, have weirdly small bodies compared to their appearance (due to feathers), and have a lot of pointy ends. Woodpeckers will take out your eye if given the chance. And tiny birds will easily have bones broken by careless hands.
Training and certification is therefore super important. For example, a common way of catching birds is via mist netting, where a very thin net is set up and birds fly into it and get tangled. You then have to disentangle the bird.
Different species of birds have different temperaments. Some are resigned to being disentangled. Others will try and fucking get you and of course get more and more tangled. I am talking about tits here. it is not uncommon that to get certified in mist netting, you have to prove you can disentangle tits specifically.
Tits are pretty common birds ; tits, titmice, and chickadees are all considered tits. and so many of these little birds are just filled with murderous rage, which I admire, they're spicy. they are the tiny rage machines in the title.
case in point: "Blue tit displaying aggression during ringing"
Tits have a propensity for violence that, as I am a much larger animal, can find endearing or funny. But this has also manifested in ways that "made headlines" , for example, pecking open the braincases of hibernating pipistrelle bats and eating their brains while the bats are still alive . The paper here proposes that ecological pressure (insect die-off likely) has resulted in these "foraging innovations" and that this behavior may be transmitted tit-to-tit via learning, e.g., cultural transmission.
In short I think they're endearing birds and again a commonly-overlooked bird because of how common they are in some places. And I think it would be fun , perhaps in a fantasy setting, to have an homage to these guys as a bloodthirsty-barbarian-civilization of anthropomorphic great tits.
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