You can discover an entire array of matterful videos related to ‘Cat Looking at Bird Feeder Through Window’ on TikTok and YouTube. Funny stuff.
Well, I do the same, stare out, and am mesmerized by the avian proximity and behavior. It is kind of like having your own live Toronto Zoo of sorts or a Marineland Canada themed amusement park - places your parents took you to, or you did as a parent. Closer to home bird feeders are a little more natural and don’t require an entry ticket.
You wonder about the birds, entertaining in their own way.
It was also good karma during the recent holiday season, colleague Coral Bissett gifted me a field guide, she said “It is a Back Roads Bill type of book."
She knows I have a sense of humour. Apparently, there are 16 types of humour one can have.
This present does look like all the other Peterson field guides (PFG), it has the same font type and book cover and is bound in the same way. That is the PFG series, it was created by Roger Tory Peterson, a well-known ornithologist, and uses the Peterson Identification System. This system focuses on visual features that are easy to notice, rather than technical features that are more interesting to scientists.
There is a series of field guides that are not like this.
Then as your eyes scan this gifted title: The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America. What? Then I realized this story is going to be like an earlier Feb. 3, 2021 story, ‘Bears do it. Bunnies do it. Campers do too,’ “Learn to poop properly in the woods with Back Roads Bill this week -- because it's different outside,” (thanks to my Village Media editor Carol Martin for the sensible title and subtitle then – she did the same for this offering).
This new book is a humorous, tongue-in-cheek parody for birders and non-birders alike. The interview was like talking to your own show’s comedian.
The beginning
The author is not a person of science - Matt Kracht, (by his own volition, pronounced: “Rhymes with rocked. As in, “Wow, his book rocked!”).
Is he an avid bird watcher? “I wouldn't say avid; I watch birds every day, because they're fascinating, and I live in the Pacific Northwest, which is lousy with them, so it's hard not to observe them. I don't do life counts or checklists, too fussy for me. I prefer to just watch. (I do keep a mental list of who poops on my back deck, though.)”
He had a dislike of math and a growing interest in art and writing eventually led him to a decades-long career in marketing (art director) at Starbucks. He has moved on to writing and drawing.
Matt says, “I create all of the artwork for my books. It's kind of a dream job – when I was a kid, all I wanted to do was write stories and draw pictures, and now look at me.”
You wonder how books begin, and his school story we can relate to. Reaching him in Seattle he told me how it all began.
“I was first introduced to bird watching when I was in the fourth grade. My teacher was an amateur ornithologist and a total nut for birds. Our class went on bird-watching field trips. We read about birds. We watched nature documentaries about birds. And we each had to write a Bird Report about a specific bird over Christmas break."
He said, “I argued for the black-capped chickadee (I liked them, and they’re everywhere in the Pacific Northwest where I live) but was ultimately assigned the golden-crowned kinglet. These things are nearly impossible to spot: they’re tiny, they hang out in the deep woods, and they don’t want to be anywhere near a fourth grader.
“I spent countless hours in the cold, dripping November woods and the knee-high grass of marshy fields with the dew soaking through my shoes trying to spot a golden-crowned kinglet so I could write my observations for the report."
He said, “I never saw one. Maybe I saw one once in a tree. But it might have been a pinecone. Impossible to tell at that distance."
We have done this in our past school lives. “The Bird Report was the first real report I ever had to write. It was also my first experience with crushing academic anxiety. On the last day of Christmas vacation, I cried because I didn’t know how to begin writing about a bird I had never seen in reality. Vacation was over, there was no time left, and I was paralyzed by impending failure. In the end, my mom made me hunker down and do it anyway.”
Remember those days.
“When I was finished, I had a blue cardboard report binder titled, Bird Report, which held the meagre collection of handwritten pages and drawings that I was able to eke out in one long evening of despair spent with an encyclopedia and a field guide borrowed from the library. It was C- grade material at best."
Fast-forward three and a half decades.
“Life is great and I’m taking a nice New Year’s Day walk with my wife along the shore of the Puget Sound near our home.
“The air is crisp, the water is lapping at the shore, the wind is rustling in the trees, and the sun is shining. Then I see it—not three feet away in the bushes at the edge of the woods—unmistakable: The Golden Crowned Kinglet! I couldn’t believe it. It was literally within arm’s reach.
“I froze and pointed it out to my wife. 'Look,' I whispered loudly, 'a golden-crowned kinglet!'”
A time warp ensued. “I carefully pulled my phone from my pocket to snap a picture of it—proof of achievement for an assignment I suddenly realized had felt incomplete for nearly forty years. But that tiny little fucker would not stop jumping from spot to spot, barely landing in the branches of a bush for a split second before it flitted away behind a leaf or into some tall grass, each time before I could find it and my camera could focus on it. It was like trying to capture photographic evidence of Bigfoot.
“'Pretty,' my wife said when it finally flew away into the trees, and we walked on.
“'You little son of a bitch,' I thought."
And then a few days later.
“After that experience with the golden-crowned kinglet that I talk about in the introduction of the book, I was waiting impatiently for a business meeting to start and, without thinking much about it, I dashed off a little sketch of the bird. This is just something I do when I'm at loose ends, I draw little pictures or make sketches of things.
"Later, a close friend laughed at it and asked if I was angry when I drew it. It became a bit of an in-joke between us, this idea of a birdwatcher who hates birds... and that was the kernel that started the whole Dumb Birds thing. The rest is history.”
What to expect
What has he done? Matt has upended the natural history genre with a series of books that put a cheeky outlook on subjects usually covered with dry, scientific prose.
This national bestselling book features 50 common North American birds, such as “the White-Breasted Butt Nugget and the Goddamned Canada Goose (A.K.A the White-Breasted Nuthatch and Canada Goose).”
Says Matt, “For those who have a disdain for birds or bird lovers with a sense of humour, this snarky, illustrated handbook is equal parts profane, funny, and—let's face it—true.”
Modelled after field guides this spoof is divided up into seven sections: how to use this book, the birds, tips for watching birds, four seasons of bird watching, extinct species, bird feeders, and keep your own bird journal. Each part is pretty informative, which balances out the downplay Kracht does against these flying creatures.
It is the perfect book for the birder and anti-birder alike.
He identifies what he terms, “the idiots in your backyard and details exactly why they suck with humorous, angry ink drawings — it is the essential guide to all things wings, and includes migratory maps, tips for birding, musings on the avian population, and the ethics of birdwatching.”
Each bird “is accompanied by facts about a bird's (annoying) call, its (dumb) migratory pattern, its (downright tacky) markings, and more.”
The biggest and funniest section is the one about the birds themselves.
Kracht devotes two pages to each bird. These contain a funny name, a description, and a wonderfully rough sketched illustration of the bird done by the author himself. The love-hate relationship shines the most in the names that the author gives to them. Kracht states in the first section that he identifies the birds not based on physical traits, but on who they are on the inside. The best example of this could be the crows, in which he labels them as “Damn Crows,” and the description is mainly how they just “caw caw caw all day.” Kracht – the name sounds ever so much like something a crow (genus Corvus ) might say?
Another hilarious section of the book is the four seasons of bird watching. This features maps of North America during spring, summer, fall, and winter. Each map shows the reader where the birds reside. For instance, “the stuck-up coastal birds will stay in the eastern United States, while those dangerous and evil loons mainly reside in Canada.”
The section on the birds themselves is the most entertaining, of course, and that is subdivided into author-created bird classifications. Kracht has grouped the birds into the categories of Typical Birds; Hummingbirds, Weirdos, and Flycatchers; Egotists and Show-offs; Floaters, Sandbirds, and Dork-legs. And take a look at the “Murderers” – birds of prey section. This is where the art is the best and also the funniest.
He illustrates each entry with rustic sketches roughly coloured in. The birds are given sarcastically slighting names (the real name is listed below the invented one).
For example, the seagull's entry reads in part "The commonly used term 'seagull' is actually a catch-all for the many different types of gull and it doesn't describe a specific bird. Practically speaking, this doesn't matter because they're all the same trash bird at heart."
His entry on the Canada Goose starts off sarcastically, "Thanks a lot, Canada." Kracht's primary complaints about our geese are “their annoying and constant loudness and their tendency to poop everywhere.”
Despite his scornful negative and fairly accurate descriptions, it is obvious that Kracht actually enjoys birds quite a lot, “and just not just roasted or baked,” he says.
Next
And if you have not had enough belly laughs - following in the footsteps of this bestselling book, there is a hilarious sequel – ‘The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of the Whole Stupid World.
His second book in the series came out in 2022. It’s been translated into several languages since then, but Kracht isn’t sure if the idioms he uses come across as they do in English.
Featuring birds from North and South America, Africa, Asia, Europe, and Oceania, he identifies “the dumb birds that manage to live all over the freaking place,” with “snarky, yet accurate, names and humorous, anger-filled drawings.”
He said, “This guidebook details exactly how much these morons suck with facts about each bird's (annoying) call, its (stupid) migratory pattern, and its (downright tacky) markings.”
Complete with a matching game, bird descriptor checklist, and tips on how to identify a bird (“you can tell a lot by looking into a bird's eyes, for example”), “this profanity-laden book offers a balance of fact and wit that will appeal to hardcore birders and casual bird lovers (and haters) alike.”
There’s more that Matt has created including: The Field Guide to Dumb Birds Sticker Book, The Big Dumb Bird Journal, and OMFG Bees! In the Bees book - for instance, we learn that yellowjackets — the most hated of all not-bees — are wasps. They are “carnivorous, mean and want your hot dog,” Kracht says.
Coming this March 1, 2025, is his newest book, A Dumb Birds Guide to the Worst Birds Ever With the subtitle, “A warning, a field guide to help you identify and stay away from the absolute worst birds ever to plague planet Earth.”
There’s a bonus! “Featuring BUMMR scores for each and every bird, an all-new scientific scale devised by the author that proves how awful birds really are.”
Matt explained the chronology of publications.
“Essentially the first book really hit a chord with people and did really well. So my publisher suggested another, and I thought, why not tackle birds from around the rest of the world? And that became The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of the Whole Stupid World. My newest book, The Dumb Birds Field Guide to the Worst Birds Ever, is the third book in the series, and naturally an escalation in the narrator character's pathos and general disapproval of avians.
"In between that and Dumb Birds of the Whole Stupid World, I wrote OMFG BEES! which is actually a pretty loving, if salty, tribute to bees, because they're amazing little creatures.”
Here’s more on the new book.
Finally
All in all, not sure why I was not aware of this book and the sequels, I guess that’s why you receive books as gifts.
Much of the humour is blue language, not suitable for children unless you want to teach them profanity. Better for the downstairs bathroom or the camp’s outhouse.
So before you purchase there’s a funny enough book- video review on YouTube on his first book to consider.
But as Matt says, “Let's face it--all birds are fascinating, wonderful, idiotic jerks--no matter where in the world they reside.”
If you have a bird feeder or are a birder this light-hearted book is definitely recommended. A perfect quirky or gag gift.
As you stare at the birds through the window this winter, without the cat, you will have a smile on your face.
