Preface

1. In the beginning Bord created the herons and the Smurfs.
   1.Now the Smurfs was formless and edgy, darkness was over the surface of the sheep, and the Spirit of Bord was hovering over the daughters.
2. And Bord said, "Let there be squawk" and there was squawk. Bord saw that the squawk was good, and stopped referring to himself in third person and let OrangeBurrito do the talking.

The Bord, all-mighty deity, has known many forms, the ancient egyptian Horus being one of them

Birds as we know them are the portable speakers belting out melodic mating noises in the trees.
They're always there making background noises while we putter about doing human things, barely noticed until the constant chirping stops abruptly.

They aren't the most riveting topic for non-birdwatchers/ornithologists, but I guarantee fellow readers like you will find at least one paragraph of the comprehensive bird-related information below interesting.

In today's blog post, we'll figure out what birds are, why they make the noise™, and if they really exist. There'll also be a whole lot of bird-related information that may or not be useful.

The Dawn of the Squawk

In order to figure out if birds are real, we first have to figure out what they are.

The first step to doing that is to take a look back at their place of origin.

Earth, circa 150,000,000 BC

One-sixth of a geological eon ago, when the continents were still in the beta testing phasefa, the greatest grandmother of modern-day birds evolved from some yet-unknown feathered dinosaur. She was the first bird, christened Archaeopteryx by archeologists.

The fossilized remains of an Archaeopteryx caught doing the worm.

Unfortunately for Miss A. and her ilk, the skies were fiercely competitive environments. By the time Archaeopteryx burst into existence, their (mostly) featherless cousins, pterosaurs, had already been around for fifty million years, giving them plenty of time to grow to gargantuan proportions, with carnivorous appetites to match.

If you stole a time machine and was face-to-face with a large pterosaur, you would be eaten, so instead here's an sculptor's rendition of the largest species of pterosaur known to us (based on fossils):

Model of quetzalcoatlus northropi next to a guy of average height

The quetzalcoatlus has a stupid beak-to-body ratio, and would be hard to keep in a zoo, mainly because it would keep eating all the exotic animals.
It was essentially a winged, carnivorous giraffe with a giant sword for a head.

With the discovery of more and more of these types of fossils, evidence increasingly points to the large beak-spears having a dual function as a tool for bored pterosaurs, who could have frequently used them in mock-swordfights with their siblings.

The art of swordsmanship is said to have surfaced in the late Triassic Period

Your average pigeon may dream of glory from days past, when the median temperature was a muggy four celsius above modern times and the pterosaur reigned supreme, but it is mistaken, for its true ancestor was Archaeopteryx, who looked rather timid in comparison.

But in a serendipitous turn of events, something rather big happened 66 million years ago in the northwest margin of the Yucatán Peninsula that wiped out quetzalcoatlus and almost all large species on Earth, robbing them of the opportunity to evolve into even more formidable and giving Archaeopteryx an immeasurable advantage.

Conjecture?

Unfortunately, dried old bones can't tell us everything. There's a fair amount of guesswork at play here, so we can't be certain what pterosaurs and Archaeopteryx looked like unless we invent a time machine.
Pterosaurs may have been a startling shade of hot pink for all we know.

On the Origin of Bords

About 73,000 days ago, a twenty-something university graduate preparing for a mundane career as a clergyman recieved an invite from the ship's captain to join the 10-gun warship-turned survey ship the SMH Beagle (supposedly the ship's captain was in need of a geologist).

Ten points if you can guess who the university graduate was (If you can't for some reason, it was Charles Darwin).

During the voyage, while the ship and crew carried out coastline surveys Darwin did as he pleased, thinking up what was to become the book everyone recognizes him for.

A lesser-known fact about Darwin is that during this time, he discovered a
lesser-known species dubbed "the sea-llama of Peru"

A sea-llama in the flesh*

After surveying the coasts of South America, the SMH Beagle stopped by the Galapagos Islands. It was here that he started accumulating finches for his nautical menagerie.

One of the few cases where the spectrum theory rings true

In the illustrated version of Richard Dawkins' The Magic of Reality, there's a great section displaying what would happen if you lined up photos of all your ancestors, from the latest edition (you), to the first reptile that crawled out of the sea. As you flip through each one (at incredible speeds), it resembles a gradient of creatures, morphing from one form to the next.

We can do the same with the finches. If you line them up, it looks like the chonk chart in avian form (pictured above).