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Artistic License – Ornithology
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Cartoon birds in starring roles tend to be the more recognizable species; anseriforms (ducks), galliforms (chickens and turkeys), strigiforms (owls), and sphenisciforms (penguins) are particularly popular and will all look pretty generic. In some cases, you will have to take the writer's word for it what species they are meant to be. Parrots (psittaciforms) are also popular and they'll sport generic chicken-like bird feet and will either be pure green with huge yellow beaks, or have cockatoo crests and a bizarre mix of rainbow colors. Diurnal raptors (falconiforms) tend to look like an odd combination of any carnivorous bird; in particular cartoonists seem to get hawks and vultures confused with each other (and sometimes corvids, which are passeriforms, are tossed into the mix too). And there's this one especially overused cliche where virtually every bird of prey, like eagles, falcons, vultures or even owls will be portrayed with the distinctive screech of the red-tailed hawk: most infamously the bald eagle, whose real cries are far less fearsome-sounding. Almost all generic small cartoon birds will behave like robins, hopping around on the lawn and eating worms. And they will appear as a Palette Swapped sparrow, often bright yellow or blue, with a yellow beak and legs. While this is the case for some passerines (like the yellow warbler or the indigo bunting), for others it's not the case. A major subtrope is the idea that all birds are chickens. Even today, when your average person is unlikely to see live chickens on a regular basis, all birds seem to act like domestic fowl. They make neat nests out of straw. They spend most of the day there and all of their time sleeping there. They lay loads and loads of oval, white eggs, and these contain babies who will emerge fluffy, yellow, adorable, and constantly chirping to their mom. Mom will then immediately lead them out of the nest to hunt for worms, of course. If the show takes things far enough, the birds will hang out in a large, somewhat organized group made up mostly of females and chicks who are led by one dominant male. Barring the possibility that it really is the hardest thing in the world to crack open a Peterson Field Guide, there may be a reason for the chicken thing. This is largely a problem of Western Animation, and Disney's shadow is extremely long. Most of his characters were domestic mammals; hence the popularity of chickens as a model for all of our flight-capable theropod friends. Furthermore, many books on animal drawing will focus almost entirely on mammal anatomy — and you might get a tiny section on the chicken to cover birds. This may or may not have to do with the fact that birds are far less diverse morphologically than mammals (despite having almost twice as many species). Thus the phrase "birds (them) and beasts (everyone else)". Can certainly extend to other flying creatures; many are the pterosaurs and other Giant Flyers that are shown constructing chicken-like nests. See also Feather Fingers, Noisy Nature, Toothy Bird, Ostrich Head Hiding, Acrophobic Bird, Flying Flightless Bird, Penguins Are Ducks, Mouthy Bird, No Cartoon Fish, and All Animals Are Dogs. The grandchild trope of Artistic License – Paleontology and sister trope of Raptor Attack. Related to Artistic License – Arachnids and Artistic License – Marine Biology. |
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The Adventure Time episode "One Last Job" averts this by showing a male bird with beautiful plumage with extravagant tail feathers while the female is drab and plain-looking, a reference to males of some bird species being more vibrant to attract possible mates (especially true when it comes to peafowl). | |
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In Finding Dory, Becky the loon's behavior seems to be a mix between a duck and a pigeon. She flies in a flock, walks upright on the ground, perches in trees and eats plant-based foods such as popcorn - none of which real loons do. Granted, she was more than a little insane… | |
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Finding Nemo: The film features beautifully-rendered and researched Great Barrier Reef fish, but has a number of inaccuracies when it comes to birds. The pelicans look more like a mixture between the Australian and American brown pelicans, though their colouration mimics that of juvenile seabirds like albatrosses and gulls, which are brown until white feathers replace the brown ones. The gulls are based on the Australian endemic species Pacific Gull, which has an absurdly oversized beak, but they are quite uncommon in Sydney occuring further south and west. In Finding Dory, Becky the loon's behavior seems to be a mix between a duck and a pigeon. She flies in a flock, walks upright on the ground, perches in trees and eats plant-based foods such as popcorn - none of which real loons do. Granted, she was more than a little insane… |
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At the end of A Bug's Life (also by Pixar), a passerine bird that constantly attacked the main characters actually hatches out several down-covered chicks with completely-opened eyes that proceed to eat Hopper alive. In real life, baby passerine birds are born mostly naked◊ (aside from a few hairy feathers in a few species) and blind, and would look nothing like they do in the film◊, which look more like baby chickens. | |
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Bleach: When Ichigo has to rescue the soul of a little boy who has been trapped inside a bird for a very long time, the bird is persistently referred to in English, including the official manga and anime English translations as a "parakeet". It's not. It's a cockatiel, a bird more closely related to cockatoos than grass parakeets (such as the budgie). | |
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"The Super-Steed of Steel" features one scene wherein a bald eagle captures a little girl called Bonnie. Birds of prey cannot carry humans around, not even toddlers. | |
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On Bones, a park ranger in an East Coast nature reserve once urged Brennan and Booth to finish up their investigation quickly, as their presence might disturb the migration of boobies through the area. This line, aside from existing solely so Booth could make a cheap boob joke, must've caused facepalms among birdwatchers everywhere, as boobies are rare outside the tropical Pacific and they certainly don't migrate anywhere along the East Coast. There may be some Fridge Logic here though, as the Northern Gannet does migrate up and down the east coast, and is from the same family of birds as the boobies (and very similar in appearance to them to the point where immature gannets can be confused for adult Brown Boobies). Why a park ranger would commit such a gaffe is still dubious. | |
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Howard the Duck: A great many things, some of which can be explained by the fact Howard is an alien and some not-so-much: Small potatoes compared to some of the other weirdness in the movie, but on Howard's homeworld, duck hens have breasts. Later on, a parody of the (in)famous "rise of man" evolution sequence is shown and Howard's earliest ancestor is... an egg. Well, at least we now know which came first. When the eponymous character freaks out over being offered eggs at a restaurant, shouting about how he's not a cannibal. This is despite the fact that as an alien, there's no way he could be even remotely related to any terrestrial bird species. And even if he was, eating chicken eggs is no more cannibalism than a human eating beef or pork is. |
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Averted in Brother Bear, in which a non-speaking bald eagle plays an important role and for once, it makes actual bald eagle sounds instead of red-tail hawk sounds. | |
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The storks in the Pixar short Partly Cloudy are also worth of noting for their somewhat flat beaks, which resemble more those of ducks than storks, but this is probably because they are easier to animate. | |
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The Simpsons Surprisingly averted in the episode "The Musk Who Fell To Earth", which had a bald eagle that made realistic chirping noises (even named "Squawky" by the family). Previous episodes, however, had it scream like a red-tailed hawk like in many portrayals. Done strangely in "Puffless" where Duffman's scarlet macaw would be drawn with the correct zygodactyl feet (two toes in forward and two in back) in some scenes and with anisodactyl feet (three toes in front and one in back) in others. Also averted with the woodpeckers in "Behind the Laughter" and the roadrunner in "The Scorpion's Tale", which both have zygodactyl feet like in real life. Played straight in "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Marge" where Lisa perpetrates the myth that rice makes birds explode. In "Bart the Mother", Seymour Skinner implies that the cuckoo and the nēnē are extinct species like the dodo, which they aren't (although the nēnē is endangered. Also, it's possible that he just meant they went extinct locally, although "extirpated" is the preferred term in that case). Also, cuckoos aren't a species but a family of birds that include the roadrunner. In "Diggs", Comic Book Guy's falcon can mimic speech in the manner of a parrot, which he lampshades. Although this gets funnier when you realize falcons are closely related to parrots. "Whistler's Father" showed toucans with cockatoo-like crests on their heads. Played for Laughs in "Bart's Comet" and "Brake My Wife, Please", which both showed penguins flying. |
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Looney Tunes: Real Life roadrunners are omnivorous, gray, about one foot long, look like little Velociraptor when walking, and make pigeon-like sounds. But the Road Runner (yes, the Road Runner) is slightly larger and more ratite-like in appearance, beeps like a car and seems to eat only bird seed . War and Pieces features a roadrunner on the wrong side of the Pacific. Daffy Duck has been heard to quack and have a white neck ring like a mallard, but has all black plumage more like a black scoter. In his very first color cartoon (back when he actually looked like a duck) Daffy had a light blue ring around his neck. Make of that what you will. Hatta Mari from Plane Daffy is a pigeon with cleavage. Actually parodied at the beginning of a Daffy cartoon where he's seen floating in a pond with a group of mallard ducks that act and look realistic. He comments that he always seems to stand out in a crowd. A riotous in-universe example provided by Daffy as Duck Dodgers when he accidentally gets the Green Lantern outfit and wise-quacks he's now the first flying example of his species. (Cue a badelynge of ducks flying by in the background.) He's heard quacking in a traditional sense. In real life, it is only the adult mallard female that does the call most are familiar with while an adult mallard drake, which is what Daffy apparently is, have their own distinct call instead. With the dodo having been extinct for decades, Robert Clampett took liberties in designing a dodo for "Porky In Wackyland." Pelicans in Warner Bros. cartoons seemed to have oversized pouches under their bill tops, leading Daffy in 1938's Porky & Daffy to quickly quip "Funny thing about the pelican, his beak can hold more than his belly can." (The pelican in question here is the referee in a fight in which Daffy is competing.) |
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Alfred J. Kwak: Dolf is half-crow, half-blackbird, an impossible cross-breed, with a yellow beak that he hides by covering it with shoe polish. He also has a crooked beak that doesn't resemble either a crow's or a blackbird's and looks more like an eagle's. His father, supposedly a full crow, has the same type of beak, so we know where he inherited it from. | |
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Surprisingly averted in Donkey Kong Country Returns. Squawks (an otherwise nondescript cartoon parrot) has two toes pointing forward and two pointing back, as a real parrot does. Earlier games in the series gave him two toes pointing forward and only one pointing back. | |
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Supergirl: "The Super-Steed of Steel" features one scene wherein a bald eagle captures a little girl called Bonnie. Birds of prey cannot carry humans around, not even toddlers. "Supergirls Super Pet": One scene features an eagle swooping down on some chicks which are running scampering around the yard...in the dead of the night. Neither eagles nor chickens are nocturnal birds, so neither of them should be out and about (let alone hunting). |
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A riotous in-universe example provided by Daffy as Duck Dodgers when he accidentally gets the Green Lantern outfit and wise-quacks he's now the first flying example of his species. (Cue a badelynge of ducks flying by in the background.) | |
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Les Voyageurs Sans Souci: When Sébastien, Agathe and Timoléon are running down a tower's staircase as fleeing from a furious eagle-owl, it is said that the swooshing of his wings is akin to the rumbling of a storm. Very dramatic, but eagle-owls make no noise whatsoever when flying. | |
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Tails Adventure gives us the Battle Bird Armada, a paramilitary organization whose ranks include Doctor Fukurokov, an owl with a beard. | |
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Light was made of this in Freefall when the crew's pet emu was outfitted with speakers to allow it to vocalize, and wakes up the genetically-enhanced wolf AI with a meep meep! ..."Can our roadrunner outrun our coyote?" | |
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Sesame Street: The segment "African Animal Alphabet" portrayed the umber bird as a generic perching bird, but the real bird is a long-legged wader. One licensed game involved a kiwi bird. Kiwis only live in New Zealand, and Sesame Street is in New York. A Running Gag is penguins walking around hither and thither. Aside from the fact that most of them play Penguins Are Ducks straight, penguins don't live in New York; they live in the Southern Hemisphere. |
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In the Brooklyn Nine-Nine episode “Return to Skyfire�, Charles mentions someone having cartilaginous lips, giving her an avian-style beak. Beaks are made of bone, not cartilage. | |
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Daffy Duck has been heard to quack and have a white neck ring like a mallard, but has all black plumage more like a black scoter. In his very first color cartoon (back when he actually looked like a duck) Daffy had a light blue ring around his neck. Make of that what you will. Hatta Mari from Plane Daffy is a pigeon with cleavage. Actually parodied at the beginning of a Daffy cartoon where he's seen floating in a pond with a group of mallard ducks that act and look realistic. He comments that he always seems to stand out in a crowd. A riotous in-universe example provided by Daffy as Duck Dodgers when he accidentally gets the Green Lantern outfit and wise-quacks he's now the first flying example of his species. (Cue a badelynge of ducks flying by in the background.) He's heard quacking in a traditional sense. In real life, it is only the adult mallard female that does the call most are familiar with while an adult mallard drake, which is what Daffy apparently is, have their own distinct call instead. |
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Let's Start Drawing: The character Timothy the Toucan is seen swimming several times despite the fact that Toucans can't swim. | |
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One episode of The Big Bang Theory has Sheldon being terrorized by what the cast calls a "blue jay." It's really a black-throated magpie-jay, which on top of that is not native to Pasadena. Justified since Sheldon has a crippling fear of birds, and wouldn't be expected to know enough about them. Also, the bird was established as an escaped pet. | |
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The Spiteful Crow enemy in EarthBound (1994) has the same problem as cartoon crows (mentioned in the Western Animation section below), in that it has a yellow beak instead of a black one. It's doubtful this was intended to be realistic as said enemies wear sunglasses and a bow tie. | |
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Artistic License – Ornithology | |
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One episode of Johnny Test has penguins referred to as "flightless furballs". | |
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Donald Duck never flies like an actual duck, but whenever we actually do see him flying, he flies like a hummingbird. Of course, strictly speaking, Donald doesn't even have wings, his wings were anthropomorphized into arms early on, so the "hummingbird-like" flight is a riff on the gag of someone flapping their arms fast enough to take flight. | |
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Sonic Boom: Lampshaded in one episode where Soar the Eagle points out the oddity that he has to use a jetpack to fly while Tails (a fox) actually can fly. | |
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The protagonist Maggie aside, magpies are portrayed as rather birdbrained in Firstborn. Even other birds consider them annoying pests. In real life, magpies have been shown to be more developmentally advanced than many other types of birds. | |
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The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen: In one of his tall tales, Munchausen narrates an encounter with a giant kingfisher which had placed its church-sized nest in a tree and laid at least five hundred eggs. Kingfishers are tiny birds which excavate burrows in riverbanks and lay two to ten eggs each time, but Munchausen would never allow facts to get in the way of a good story. | |
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Not Always Right: One customer insisted that only mammals have meat, ergo chicken is a mammal. Another claimed that a leaking package of chicken can't have gotten blood everywhere, because birds don't have blood. "If God wanted birds to fly, he'd have given them wings or something!" |
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In The Giant Claw, the eponymous bird... thing has a mouthful of some other animals' teeth, human hair, and can flare its nostrils. This would be excused because it's an alien, but it's already so fake-looking that the nostrils just compound the silliness. | |
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Rio deals with this with mixed success. The parrots are referred to only as "blue macaw", but they are a real species, Spix's Macaws note called "blue macaws" in Brazilian Portuguese, which really are nearly extinct in the wild, had lived in Brazil, and are currently the subject of a captive breeding program. The other birds in the movie are also real Brazilian species. But: The macaws' and toucans' feet are generic cartoon bird feet with two toes pointing forward and one pointing back, when they should have two pointing forward and two pointing back, like real parrot-types do. Blue and Jewel also sport Cockatoo-like crests, although much smaller ones than Nigel, the actual cockatoo. Rafael the Toco toucan has a mate who more closely resembles a Keel-billed toucan. Interspecies Romance, maybe, but they have kids. While blue macaws are accurately portrayed as cavity nesters, there's a yellow parrot in the opening scene who nests on a branch instead. The only parrots that build nests on tree branches are monk parakeets, and even they don't build classic "cup" nests. Also, parrot hatchlings don't look like that. Presumably, Rule of Cute overrode reality, as parrots, like most arboreal birds, enter the world naked and blind. They also shouldn't be able to fly, and also one couple having babies wouldn't save the species like in the movie, as inbreeding leads to genetic defects. Blue-and-yellow macaws have their face covered in blue and yellow feathers, when it should be naked with white skin. They also lack black feathers which line the facial skin and cover the chin. Blu at one point admits to peeing in the birdbath. Birds can't pee. |
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Artistic License – Ornithology | |
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In Jungle 2 Jungle, Mimi-Siku points out a bird and says "hoko." His father interprets this as meaning "bird," but Mimi-Siku corrects him by saying "hoko" means "toucan" and that "bird" is a different word. The problem is that the bird pointed out was a scarlet macaw, not a toucan. | |
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Artistic License – Ornithology | |
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Some fun with falconry - Henry VIII in The Tudors is shown handling a Harris's Hawk, a North American species that would be utterly alien to 16th century falconers and in fact, only popularized in Europe from the late 20th century onwards. | |
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The premise of "Eagle Egg Hunt", a segment of Molly of Denali, is that Molly must re-position a naturalist's webcam so viewers won't miss the hatching of three bald eagle chicks. Actual raptor eggs are laid, and hatch, a day or two apart, ensuring that one chick will be younger and weaker: if there's not enough food for a trio of chicks, the youngest automatically loses out and dies rather than all three starving slowly. | |
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In a weird version, the Moas of Guild Wars look nothing like the real moa, but are fairly accurate phorusrhacids... | |
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Artistic License – Ornithology | |
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Woody Woodpecker. A garishly-colored feather duster with goggly green eyes and a beak that occasionally exhibits teeth, he's no doubt been the cause of many an ornithologist's tears. Then again, the species he is in theory, the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, entered urban legend status around when they started making these cartoons. | |
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In the The X-Files episode "Chimera," Mulder is put on a case in which ravens are behaving strangely and may be involved in the disappearance of a woman. The ravens are featured extensively... but every bird in the episode is a crow. | |
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Harry Potter: In addition to Hedwig, a snowy owl, being depicted as hooting and flying at night, the cover of◊ Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets clearly depicts a Barn Owl (Tyto alba) in the owl cage during the Ford Anglia drive. It is well known that Hedwig is a Snowy Owl (Bubo scandiacus formerly Nyctea scandiaca). Draco Malfoy's eagle owl is far bigger than one would expect, as demonstrated here◊. Eagle owls have a range of different sizes; the Eurasian Eagle-owl is currently the largest owl living in Britain. It's the largest species of owl in the world, actually. The whole series is full of weird owl behavior. Hedwig drinking orange juice is one example; owls, like cats, are pretty much hypercarnivorous and probably wouldn´t even consider that stuff drinkable. Owls of many species are kept together in a castle tower, when in reality this would be a recipe for disaster; larger owls are extremely intolerant of smaller owl species and will kill and eat them if they have the chance. Hedwig and Ron's diminutive owl Pigwidgeon are kept together at one point which would've resulted in Harry's pet eating his best friend's. The list goes on and on. |
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Scribblenauts lets you summon almost anything, and does recognize several potentially obscure bird species. However, because of the DS cartridge's limited space, many of these birds reuse a different species' model. Summoning a hamerkop (a small stork-like pelecaniform) summons a woodpecker. Summoning a tropicbird (a small seabird) gives you a swan. Writing "frigatebird" (another seabird) gives you a robin. The secretary bird (a terrestrial bird of prey) is treated as a crane (a close relationship between the two was once suggested, but was long-abandoned by 2009). |
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Artistic License – Ornithology | |
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A Geico commercial features a team of men trekking to the South Pole, only to find that Dora the Explorer beat them to it. The ad shows penguins, but they're African penguins, a species that wouldn't be able to survive in the extreme cold of the Antarctic. | |
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Arthur: In "So Long, Spankie", DW has a pet budgie which ends up dying that same episode to teach An Aesop about death. His design is simplified and he doesn't even have the normal (typically blue) cere of a male budgie. Also, unless he died of a disease or was adopted as an elderly bird or when D.W. was a baby, it seems unusual that he died because he's described as D.W.'s bird, meaning he can't have been living with the Reads for longer than four years, and budgies live 5-8 years. In "Muffy's House Guests", peregrine falcons are described as an endangered species. They're not even close, thriving in urban environments. (On the other hand they used to be an endangered species for much of the 80’s and 90’s, meaning that a writer could have been under the impression they were still endangered.) "Brain Freeze" involves an ice cream shop whose mascot is a blue penguin with a pig's tail. Brain lampshades this: For The Birds is about the characters trying to spot a rare bird called the green-tailed grebe. No real grebe species by that name exists, and in any case the bird in the show looks more like a duck than a grebe. It's also shown perching in a tree, which grebes are completely incapable of doing. |
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Wonder Pets!: Ming-Ming can fly, even though she clearly still has her down feathers, not her flight feathers. She also mentions needing to pee in "Save the Puppy", despite the fact that birds don't pee. | |
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The ostriches in the "Dance of the Hours" sequence of Fantasia are supposed to be female... but the plumage is that of a ''male'' ostrich. Females are brown. | |
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The Colbert Report: And there's always that wonderful moment, known to all birdwatchers, when you're watching a movie and it shows a shot of a bald eagle... while a Red-Tailed Hawk screams in the background. Presumably they thought sparrow-like chirping wasn't manly enough for the mascot of Eagleland. Once an Episode on The Colbert Report, the eagle in the opening credits (whose name is Liberty, if you were wondering) makes precisely this noise. This makes sense in the context of the show, as bald eagles should sound like that. | |
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The movie Legend Of The Guardians The Owls Of Ga Hoole is one of the least obnoxious examples, and goes well out of its way to avoid this trope. For the most part the birds looked, acted and moved like owls. The film even avoids the dreaded Acrophobic Bird trope ("We're on the ground! The worst place for an owl!"), but there are a few inaccuracies: Their eyes. The fixed raptor glare wouldn't have cut it in a visual medium. Nyra, a female Barn Owl (Tyto alba) is nearly solid white, with a few gray patches and spots. In real life, only male Barn Owls could have this coloration. Females are considerably darker. Then again, her plumage is more due to Color-Coded for Your Convenience. Soren's mother and father represent the normal colour dimorphism for barn owls. It's also stated in the books that one of the defining traits of Nyra is her very white facial mask and body. Several times it's stated there that her face looks like the full moon came out of the sky and down to earth. Which means the film-makers actually got that part right. Another sexual dimorphism aspect, and probably the most glaring error in a film that managed to get things mostly right, is the fact that for many owl species, the females are significantly larger than the males. In no scene is this more glaringly wrong than the scene with the king and queen snowy owl, where the queen is smaller and more slender than the king, because Women Are Delicate. In reality, the sizes would be reversed, with the female a good head taller and heavier, as well as heavily spotted. This mistake is particularly unusual considering that the books this movie was based on does get this aspect right. |
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Artistic License – Ornithology | |
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Phineas and Ferb The ostriches have three toes on each foot, instead of two like in real life. Pelicans not only have oversized bill pouches but also generic bird feet with only three toes (real pelicans have four toes that are all webbed). Zig-zagged in "The O.W.C.A. Files" where Maggie the macaw would have zygodactyl feet (correct for parrots) in some scenes and with anisodactyl feet in others. |
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Karl Pilkington from The Ricky Gervais Show told the story of how Plato died, incredibly incorrect. He stated that there's a species of bird (or that there used to be) that dropped its eggs onto rocks so they would hatch, and as Plato was bald and from above his head would look like a rock, the bird dropped it and the egg killed him. Ricky and Stephen just laughed and didn't bother trying to correct him, though they said he was wrong on so many levels. | |
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One episode of The Flintstones had a dodo (which looked nothing like a real dodo) that mimics speech like a parrot. This is lampshaded by the main characters. Then again, it is a Running Gag on the show that prehistoric things act just like their (very) loose modern counterparts. | |
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Artistic License – Ornithology | |
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In The Sword in the Stone, Archimedes the owl has only three toes in each foot; two pointing forwards and one pointing backwards (and even that back toe could be interpreted as a heel). | |
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In The Sims 2 Pets, there's a birdcage with fairly accurate-looking models of several different species, including an African Gray Parrot, a Crested Cockatoo, and...an American Kestrel. They're all roughly the same size and can be interacted with the same way, including Play With and Teach to Talk. An American Kestrel is a small falcon. Not only is it smaller than an African Gray Parrot or a Scarlet Macaw, it is absolutely impossible to teach any falcon to talk, and if you play with one you should definitely be protecting your hand. (Somewhere, an ornithologist and a falconer are crying on each others' shoulders.) | |
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In the Charlie's Angels (2000) movie, Natalie (Cameron Diaz) pinpoints the Big Bad's fortress by listening to a bird call over her connection to Bosley, being held captive there. She pinpoints the bird as a pygmy nuthatch, which she says is only found in Carmel, California. Two problems: 1) The bird depicted was not a pygmy nuthatch, and 2) even if it were, the nuthatch's range goes from Mexico all the way into British Columbia. | |
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In the Llama Llama episode "Let's Go Camping", a crow call is heard at night, despite corvids being diurnal. | |
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Migration: After having his primary feathers damaged, Dax is able regain his ability to fly by sticking the discarded feathers of the other ducks, (and one macaw), into the gaps. Not only that, but the larger feathers allow him to fly faster and more agile than normally, AND the replacement feathers last him a very long time. At the film's climax, the flock briefly gets lost on the way to Jamaica, and rest in the water. Fine for the ducks, obviously, but Delroy is shown swimming alongside them easily, and even taking off out of the water with no difficulty. While real life parrots can float due to being light, they cannot swim, and their feathers aren't waterproof to allow for an easy takeoff when soaked. Dax and Gwen are much smaller than their parents, but in most birds, including mallards, chicks that have reached fledgling age are close to the size and appearance of their parents to the point it might be hard to tell them apart. Gwen in particular looks only duckling size despite having adult plumage and being able to fly. One of the film's gags involves Gwen needing to poop and trying to hold it in because she wants to find somewhere private to go. In reality, she'd simply go when it was time whether she wanted to or not since ducks lack sphincters and are therefore incapable of "holding it". Going while flying is normal for a bird anyhow, and there's no requirement that they need to land to go. Mallards are classified as an r-selected species, meaning they produce large numbers of offspring, with females usually laying 8 to 13 eggs at a time. Pam and Mack were obviously limited to having only Dax and Gwen as designing and animating an exorbitant number of ducklings would've been unreasonable. Also, unlike many waterfowl, mallards are not monogamous; they don't form family units and only the female cares for the young. Pam remarks that Mack's scary bedtime stories cause Gwen to "wet her twig bed," and later on during their journey, Gwen is gripped with the urge to go number 2. Birds are locked in to excreting liquid and solid wastes together by design. Played for Laughs at the end, when Mack encounters a flock of penguins that somehow got so lost they ended up in Jamaica from Antarctica. While vagrant Antarctic penguins are possible, they're only known from as far north as Australia, Chile, or New Zealand. |
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Arrietty also averts this by demonstrating corvid intelligence. A crow spots Arrietty, caws, and looks away, so Arietty turns away as well, to talk to Sho. Several minutes later, the "harmless" crow suddenly attacks from her blind side. Only the cawing of another crow gives the attack away at the last second. | |
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An episode of Rome has an Australian sulfur-crested cockatoo kept as a household pet. In ancient Rome, more than fifteen hundred years before European contact with Australia. The DVD commentary explains that they asked the animal suppliers for an exotic-looking bird and that was what they got. | |
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The Loud House: In "Face the Music with the Casagrandes", Sergio the scarlet macaw gets a sore throat from chilli shrimp, said to be from the chilli. Chilli peppers are actually good for parrots. Crows are portrayed with yellow beaks and feet. Real crows have black beaks and feet. In "The Loudest Thanksgiving", Sergio sees the killing of a turkey, goose, and pigeon as a "triple homicide". Macaws, turkeys, geese, and pigeons, despite being all birds, are different species. |
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Averted in Animorphs: Tobias' iconic "TSEEEEEEERRRRR!" is a decent onomatopeia for the classic "bird of prey" sound in movies... because he is a red-tailed hawk. | |
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Hit-Monkey: In "Home Sweet Home", a snowy owl claims it cleared the remains of Hit-Monkey's tribe and later wants to eat Bryce's remains. While owls can scavenge it's still rather rare and certainly not enough to make eating dead primates a regular thing. | |
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"Supergirls Super Pet": One scene features an eagle swooping down on some chicks which are running scampering around the yard...in the dead of the night. Neither eagles nor chickens are nocturnal birds, so neither of them should be out and about (let alone hunting). | |
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Mulan: Hayabusa, Shan-Yu's loyal pet, normally acts like a falcon (albeit with a red-tailed hawk's call) until the very end after getting all his feathers burnt off. He promptly starts to cluck like a chicken. He can also run around on the ground as swiftly as a chicken, which, while funny, is very hard for most falcons to do due to their anatomy. (Flightless falcons in rehab actually can and do run as their primary way of getting around, and they are surprisingly good at it) He also has vertical slit pupils (unknown in any bird of prey; actually there's only one bird with vertical pupils, the skimmer). Then again, weird eyes are also a prominent trait of his master, Shan-Yu. | |
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Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney has Polly, a pet parrot with the coloration of a scarlet macaw- minus any black on the beak- but a crest like a cockatoo that's raised all the time. She is also notably depicted with three toes in the front and a hallux in the back, whereas parrots have two toes in the front and two in the back*This is also present in the anime adaptation, although a couple of scenes do depict her with proper feet. | |
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Classic horror film The Birds suffers from this once or twice. Not so much from the birds' behavior, since it's kind of the entire point that the birds are behaving very oddly, but from two specific scenes: The first is when the seagull smashes into a door and kills itself. One character states that it must have lost its way in the dark, while the other points out that there's a full moon. Really, most birds have atrocious night vision, and will only take flight at night if they have no other choice. Even with a full moon, the gull likely couldn't have seen much.note Many birds that are normally diurnal do migrate at night, but navigate primarily using the stars rather than the moon. The second is much worse in that it's an ornithologist speaking. She states that birds are quite stupid due to their small brains. Not only are many birds reasonably clever, but brain size and mental ability are two factors that actually don't correlate nearly as well as most folks expect. Ravens, which are exceptional problem-solvers and widely considered the smartest birds in the world, have very small brains. This was still a fairly widespread belief among ornithologists at the time period the film is set in. |
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Margaret from Regular Show. The official site calls her a robin. She's bright red like a male cardinal, but really looks more like a Palette Swap of Mordecai (a bluejay). And she has lady pecs. | |
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The Three Caballeros - While the birds are either Funny Animals or slightly cartoony, the Disney animators did show their work, showcasing many obscure species. The one major misstep is the Aracuan Bird. Aracuans are real, but look and act nothing like their Disney equivalent, making the Clown of the Jungle a "take our word for it" case on par with Chuck Jones's Roadrunner. If we were to compare the Aracuan to an actual Brazilian rainforest bird, it most closely resembles the capuchinbird (which shares the bald forehead and long thick feathers on the back of the head and neck). It also happens to have a really weird call (although nothing resembling the cartoon bird's hysterical voice). The name "aracuá" is given to the noisy chachalaca in Brazil. And there has to be some inspiration from Woody Woodpecker as well. | |
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Averted in the Switch version of Go Vacation. Macaws, toucans, and woodpeckers are correctly depicted with two toes in front and two in back. | |
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In Babylon Rising by Tim La Haye and Greg Dinallo, villain Talon trains hawks to serve as instant messenger pigeons. Furthermore, his trained hawks can unroll scrolls, kill a man by dive-bombing his back, and fly around carrying big snake statue bits. | |
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Saludos Amigos has a greater rhea which is identified as an "Argentine ostrich", complete with having only two toes and its Portuguese name translated to "avestruz" (the proper name in the language is "ema"). | |
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The Final Fantasy series' Chocobos are functionally ostrich-like horse analogues. In some games like Final Fantasy Tactics, they have a vaguely plausible, though friendly appearance, but traditionally are cuted up and somewhat resemble chicken-like moas. Some can also fly, despite being as big as a donkey. Baby chocobos are pure "baby chick" though. | |
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New Life SMP: The Penguin origin is described to have fur, even though birds have feathers and not fur. In this case, the blame's more on the creators of the mod than the SMP members themselves. | |
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Wheel of Fortune has trouble with bird-related puzzles, most often by putting two completely unrelated birds in the same puzzle. Twice they've had SPARROWS & PARAKEETS as a puzzle, and another time, they had CARDINALS & CANARIES — which is doubly wrong, as cardinals are a family of birds, and canaries a distinct species. | |
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Chicken Run: The entire premise is that Mrs Tweedy, tiring of the low profits from egg production, decides to convert the farm to make chicken pies instead. However chickens good for egg laying make poor meat birds and vice versa, so if she had succeeded her pies would have been poor quality and unlikely to sell well. The premise does work however, if you assume that the current chickens will be used to make a prototype pie batch to prove the machine and concept work and once this has happened a broiler breed will replace them. It wouldn't even be out of the question for her to simply either not know or care about this fact, as neither her or her husband are particularly intelligent and only seem in it for the money; there's even a gag where they (accidentally) agree that the chickens are "revolting". | |
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The Jungle Book (2016): A cuckoo chick is shown sitting in a nest on a branch, when its foster parent, depicted by a green bee-eater, arrives to feed it. However, while there are many different cuckoo species in India and they are nest parasites of a fairly wide variety of birds, bee-eaters are not among those species known to be targeted by cuckoos. Also, bee-eaters don't build nests; they breed in burrows excavated in riverbanks and sandy areas. At another point in the movie, while Baloo and Bagheera are climbing the cliff in pursuit of the Bandar-log, the call of a red-tailed hawk (a species not found in India) is heard. |
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Sonic the Hedgehog: Tails Adventure gives us the Battle Bird Armada, a paramilitary organization whose ranks include Doctor Fukurokov, an owl with a beard. The Babylon Rogues are neither shown to be able to fly (rather, they ride upon sky-surfing hoverboards). They also generally resemble one another, despite Jet, Wave, and Storm being a hawk, a swallow, and an albatross respectively; all very different species. Oh yeah, and the second game they're in implies they're the descendants of aliens. |
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An interesting case with Duckman, its case of the show trying to make a nod to realism but missing the mark by being too clever by half, in "Papa Oom M.O.W. M.O.W.", Duckman, who seems to be hitting it off with two very beautiful (and very stupid) ladies, comments in an aside that he wishes he had a penis. Now it's true that most birds don't have penisesnote Most birds, male and female, have one opening, called the cloaca, for all of their digestive and reproductive output but among the small handful of birds that do? Ducks. | |
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The pelicans in Feeding Frenzy: Shipwreck Showdown hunt by skimming the water surface, which isn't something any real pelican does. | |
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Animal Crossing: The ostrich villagers have generic bird feet (three toes with a hallux) instead of only two toes like in real life. However, a few of them closely resemble other long-necked birds like cranes, herons and flamingos rather than ostriches. The character of Blathers the museum curator, combines the above inaccuracies about owls with another example that mixes this and Rule of Funny: a Running Gag in the series is that Blathers dislikes touching insects whenever you donate them to the museum, when in reality; owls often eat insects. Blathers himself is aware of this fact when describing the dynastid beetle in City Folk. |
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Minecraft: Chickens all look like hens, but they can mate. Chicks are also hatched with crests and white feathers, even though real chicks are yellow and don't have crests yet. Subverted for parrots — initially they ate cookies, despite Minecraft cookies being chocolate chip and chocolate being poisonous to cookies. Later, a patch made it so that cookies killed them. |
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Ralph from Martha Speaks was revealed to be a female duck in "his" second appearance upon laying eggs, in spite of having the coloring of a male mallard. | |
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In the Henry Danger episode "Grand Theft Otto", the titular class pet Otto has a male name and is referred to as male, but is very clearly a female eclectus parrot. | |
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Zig-zagged in Pixar's Up. For the most part, Kevin's behavior gloriously averts this trope, since she acts pretty much like a bird would in real life; even her eating Carl's cane before spitting it out is a typical avian reaction to testing something for edibility and finding a negative result. That being said, though, she looks more like an avian Cartoon Creature than anything else - she has the body shape of a ratite, but colorful plumage more like a bird of paradise. Additionally, the bright coloration she sports is more common in male birds than females, and in many ratites it is the male that raises the young, so it would be more realistic to refer to Kevin as a "he" (although it's never confirmed which gender Kevin really is). | |
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The iconic "Dead Parrot Sketch" from Monty Python's Flying Circus involves a Norwegian blue parrot. There are no wild parrots in Norway — or anywhere else in Europe — or just about anywhere else north of the Tropic of Cancer. | |
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Beast Legends (a 2010 series about reconstructing mythical creatures based on the biomechanics of real animals) had a giant bird that launches quadrupedally like a pterosaur. Aside from the fact that it has too many fingers (4 instead of 3), no real bird has a hand remotely appropriate for such a launch. Although it's technically not a real bird, that is no excuse. | |
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One episode of Johnny Bravo had an emu being fed avocados, which are poisonous to birds. | |
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In The Bird Feeder, while there is a veneer of accuracy, and often actual bird facts are used, there are several mistakes that have been made. A particularly egregious example occurs in #202, "Old Country," when Josh asks Gramps what he means when he refers to "the old country," and Gramps replies, "You know, Carolina," referring to the Carolina chickadee. Josh and Gramps are established as black-capped chickadees, which is a separate species. Attempts have been made to apologize for inaccuracies, such as #373, "Size," which shows the actual relative sizes of the birds, and #398, "True Colors," and #399, "Another Apology," which shows the correct coloring of cardinals and bluebirds. This doesn't mean the inaccuracies have been corrected, though, and laziness is given as an excuse for continuing them. | |
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The Jonny Quest episode "Treasure of the Temple" had a toucan that can mimic human speech like a parrot. | |
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Done in-universe in Ed, Edd n Eddy where they make a bet by taking on the others' personality quirks and behaviors, with Eddy trying to unsuccessfully imitate Edd's Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness by claiming chickens to be mammals just because they can't fly. | |
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In Drawn: The Painted Tower, you must conjure up a cardinal to eat the bugs that plague a talking tree. Cardinals are seed-eaters, with short conical beaks unsuited to preying upon insects. | |
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In Aladdin, Iago is a zoogeographical mystery. His pointed tail and coloration resemble a scarlet or red-and-green macaw, but that would be really weird considering the movie takes place in Medieval Arabia and America hadn´t been discovered yet (macaws are exclusively New World birds). Also he seems rather small for a macaw. There's also the possibility that he's a red lory, which is native to Indonesia. And let's not even get into the fact that he has teeth and is lacking one toe in each foot. | |
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The (in)famous peeing baby penguin in Happy Feet Two. Penguins are in the Neognathae infraclass of birds, they not only don't have a urethra (just a cloaca), they don't even have urine. Their bodies use uric acid instead of urea, and uric acid (the white paste in pigeon poop) doesn't have to be diluted in water. | |
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Pokémon: The Series portrays Spearow, an aggressive bird Pokémon combining traits of a sparrow and a bird of prey, as having black and white vision. While it is a Pokémon and not an animal, this still can come across as slightly odd. | |
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In Clash of the Titans, Zeus' totem is a bald eagle. Bald eagles live in North America, not Greece. Contact between the two continents was not formally established until many centuries after the movie is supposed to take place. The nearest plausible analog would have been the similar-looking, but lesser celebrated, White-Tailed Eagle, or the similar-sized and equally impressive Golden Eagle. | |
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Warrior Cats: Snowkit was taken by an unspecified type of hawk. However, the only hawk in the area that books are based on is too small to drag a 5-month old cat. Either Snowkit was very small, the bird was abnormally large, or it was Misplaced Wildlife. | |
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In Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, the villains are crows who want to bring about an eternal night. Crows are diurnal (active during the day) and like most birds have awful night vision, so why they'd want an endless night is perplexing. One wonders why the game-makers didn't just go with owls. | |
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Another All Birds Are Chickens toe error: On The Mysteries of Alfred Hedgehog, a woodpecker was depicted with three toes in front and one in back, rather than the proper two-and-two. Rather disappointing for a show intended to advance science/nature education. | |
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Angry Birds: The titular birds have feathers, beaks, and eggs, but the similarities end there — their lack of any limbs to speak of is due to stylization. They also come in multiple colors and shapes, and supplementary material describes them as being of different species, but they all take care of three similar-looking eggs in a chicken-like cup nest. Different unrelated species of bird in Real Life wouldn't cooperate in such a specific manner... though then again, they don't exactly hurl themselves out of slingshots to take down green pigs in poorly constructed structures, either. | |
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In The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!, it is implied that Molly the Monster's pink coloring comes from her having some genetic material from a flamingo. In real life, flamingos' pink color comes from proteins in the plankton they eat, and their feathers turn drab without it. | |
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Mary Poppins features the title character singing with a robin during "Spoonful of Sugar"; however, it's an American robin, while the story takes place in London. It's also a pair of male robins building that nest. | |
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Pelicans in Warner Bros. cartoons seemed to have oversized pouches under their bill tops, leading Daffy in 1938's Porky & Daffy to quickly quip "Funny thing about the pelican, his beak can hold more than his belly can." (The pelican in question here is the referee in a fight in which Daffy is competing.) | |
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Family Guy The episode "Friends of Peter G" features a gag where two drunk seagulls are talking about how KFC is delicious, and one of them freaks out when the other one points out that he's eating bird. Never mind that there are plenty of other animal species which will eat their own kind—a gull eating chicken is no more cannibalism than a person eating a cow. That, and some species of gulls will prey on other birds. On the other hand, they were drunk. Another episode had a gag involving "backwards-knee birds", in which a heron taunts an alligator by making a "backward-knee" step away from it. Birds do not have a backwards-pointing knee, that is actually their ankle. The B-plot "Brian Wallows and Peter's Swallows" has Peter being forced to carry a white-rumped swallow (then later, its offspring) in his beard because as an endangered species, he's legally barred from disturbing its habitat. In Real Life, white-rumped swallows are under no threat; they have a large range, a large population, and their numbers are increasing steadily. |
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Spyro: Year of the Dragon: Sgt. Byrd is a penguin unique for his ability to fly, which he achieved by being raised by hummingbirds according to his backstory. Yes, a bird with solid bones and short, flipper-like wings managed to become capable of flight simply because he was raised by hummingbirds. The hummingbirds themselves are absolutely enormous compared to Sgt. Byrd whereas in real life, all hummingbirds are smaller than all penguins. Harbor Speedway had what appear to be seagulls referred to as blue-footed boobies. This is in spite of the fact their feet are yellow! |
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The Bartimaeus Trilogy is normally correct on this and parodies this trope when Bartimaeus transforms into a raven for the first time and it was in the dark. He winds up almost normal but with a bright blue beak. | |
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The ducks in Breadwinners eat nothing but bread, which would kill a real duck. | |
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Gravity Falls The taxidermy ostrich seen in the episode "Northwest Mansion Mystery" has a hallux. Pileated woodpeckers are drawn with two toes pointing forward, and only one pointing backward. Meanwhile, the macaw from "The Hand That Rocks the Mabel" (referred to as a "South American rainbow macaw" and resembling a blue-and-gold macaw with a red head) has three toes in front and one in back. The American white pelican seen in "Legend of the Gobblewonker" has a bill pouch too large. |
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The Rescuers Down Under: The bird chart Jake looks at when Wilbur is about to land shows various species such as scrubbird, lorikeet, honeyeater, butcherbird, galah, noisy miner, rufous whistler (misspelled as "rufus whistler"), crested bellbird, freckled duck and flowerpiercer. However, almost none of these birds are the right shape and size (for example, the dove seems to be smaller than the wren, the crested bellbird looks more like a cockatoo), and flowerpiercers are native to South America - they probably meant to call it a flowerpecker, which would have been more accurate for Australia. Both Rescuers movies also underestimate the albatross' size enormously if you compare them to the mice characters. Also, albatrosses are found almost exclusively in the southern hemisphere (although they lived in Bermuda in prehistoric times). What one is doing in New York is anyone's guess. On the other hand the eagle character, Marahute, is absurdly oversized; while the Australian Wedge-Tailed Eagle is one of the largest flying birds in the world, it's not nearly large enough for a human child to ride on. In her case it's Invoked; she's a fictional species whose magnificent size and rarity is the main crux of the plot. |
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