It’s no surprise that bird species cover a great variety of personalities and quirks. Some birds seem social, friendly, talkative, and unusual. Others seem selfish, boisterous, even diabolical. With all this variety, we can’t help but wonder, for some of these species…what is their moral agenda?
Perhaps you’ve heard of the “moral alignment chart”. It originates with table-top roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons, but has since been used to categorize the moral positions of people in many other contexts, typically characters from movies and TV shows.
Essentially, it’s a chart that labels where individuals fall on two different continuums:
Lawful, Neutral, or Chaotic
Good, Neutral, or Evil.
These continuum positions combine to create nine different moral positions:
Strict code of conduct, no respect for rules or others….Anything coming to mind yet on any particular bird species for some of these descriptions?
We have some thoughts.
Birds may not be people, but with some silly suspension of belief, we’ve chalked up some birds’ quirky behaviors as traits that resemble moral agendas. We had to make our own bird-specific interpretations, like these:
Lawful means routine, predictable, “traditional” in a sense of frequently seen in similar species.
Neutral (between law and chaos) means occasionally breaking from what looks like ordered bird behavior, having a few odd or unexplainable behaviors.
Chaotic means having weird, funny, or strange behaviors. The birds do things that we don’t really understand the purpose of.
Good means not harming any other birds (the exception being raptors that eat other birds, as long as they are merciful when doing so).
Neutral (between good and evil) means sometimes harming other birds, but usually for excusable reasons. They might be unnecessarily territorial or have just a few bird-harming behaviors.
Evil means often harming other birds. Many of their behaviors are ruthless or agitating. They’re basically jerks.
So with this in mind, after some playful research, here’s what we’re thinking:
So…why these guys?
Peregrine Falcon as Lawful Good: Ah, the bird equivalent of the lawful superhero. Very traditional in their hunting and mating behaviors. These tenacious underdogs made a forceful comeback from population decline due to pesticides, a story that leaves all of us rooting for them. Although major bird predators, Peregrine Falcons are merciful and respectful.
Carolina Wren as Neutral Good: These guys may seem chaotic, but they actually only have a few unorganized behaviors. Yes, they nest in odd places and break into song at nearly any hour, but they are otherwise predictable. They mate for life, remain in pairs, and often stay in the same quarters their whole life. They are friendly and mostly non-aggressive, plus, their singing is quite joyful and pleasant. Who could find that anything but good?
Brown Headed Nuthatch as Chaotic Good: If you’ve ever studied Brown Headed Nuthatches carefully, you know they have a lot of odd behaviors. Siblings preen each other, many are cooperative breeders, and they use tools to find food. They join foraging groups in the winter with other birds species, a classic “whatever we need to do to thrive” mentality that perfectly represents Chaotic Good.
Great Horned Owl as Lawful Neutral: “If there is a disagreement over their territory, it can sometimes end in death”. Well if that’s not Lawful Neutral! Great Horned Owls are neither diabolical nor forgiving. They are monogamous, and like Peregrine Falcons, they are fierce but merciful hunters. They live by themselves most of the time, except when they’re nesting, a staple Neutral behavior.
Wood Duck as True Neutral: …For now, we will leave you with our one solid reason we placed Wood Ducks in True Neutral: Wood Duck babies are encouraged to leap out of nests from great heights, and the parents don’t help it at all. This screamed True Neutral so strongly to us, we just decided to give this one to them. There’s more supporting evidence, but this fact should be convincing enough.
Red Bellied Woodpecker as Chaotic Neutral: These birds have playful, almost game-like behavior. One will tap on the inside of of a cavity, and another will tap back on the other side. That’s strange isn’t it? They also fly around erratically, chattering and suddenly changing course, and it’s still not understood why. Red Bellied Woodpeckers aren’t entirely wholesome, as they will sometimes take over nests of smaller birds. But we cut them some slack because more often, they are the victims of these home heists by European Starlings.
Northern Mockingbird as Lawful Evil: Where to begin! Northern Mockingbirds are mimics, an act easily interpreted as evil because, well, it’s pretty darn manipulative. They are overly defensive, paroling two territories in the fall and winter (one for breeding, one for feeding) No one else is allowed in, not even to eat some berries. They are strongly monogamous. They’re willing to lawfully stick to their code of attacking anything that might be potentially threatening.
Blue Jay as Neutral Evil: Nest attacking. Pointless intimidation in the backyard. Yet, Blue Jays will work together with other birds at feeders to ward off greater threats. Do they mimic raptors to warn other birds of an intruder, or to deceive other species into thinking a threat is present? It’s hard to say. Basically a Blue Jay is Neutral simply because it’s hard to understand their reasons for their sneaky and certainly evil behaviors. There’s MUCH more than this alone, but for now, we hope you agree.
Brown Headed Cowbird as Chaotic Evil: Oof. This one’s nearly unarguable. Brown Headed Cowbirds are brood parasites, meaning they lay their eggs in the nests of other birds to “host”. If a host rejects a cowbirds’ egg, the female cowbird may destroy the host’s eggs or even the hatched babies. This is just the tip of the iceberg not only of the diabolical nature of their parasitism, but even in some of their odd behaviors among fellow Brown-Headed Cowbirds.
Note that this is all in the spirit of honoring the delightful mystery of birds, so we hope you find this playful categorization enjoyable and fun. Whether Lawful Good or Chaotic Evil, lets appreciate the variety in all these species, from the boisterous musicians to the cunning seed thieves to the mighty raptors!
Want more info? Well, we featured each of these birds on our Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter pages during January of 2020. We dove into more evidence for why these birds in these moral positions. So if you’d like to learn more about each of these fascinating birds, please check out these links to see each of the posts on Facebook!
