Birds. I love birds. They are little miracles, our tiny dinosaurs. There are birds who can remember, literally, 10,000 locations for stored food. There are birds that weigh nothing, but glimmer and hover and can shoot off like a comet. There are birds that are a comedy show trying to take of or land, but are deadly snakes underwater. There are birds blacker than any other black on earth because their potential mates can see UV and their feathers absorb that too. And there are birds like the scarlet macaw, where if you see a flock of thirty-some, you know it will always be an even number, because the pairs always stay together and no one knows what happens to the birds who lose a mate. Not that birds are some morally perfect animals. Ducks, in particular, have a generally outrageous level of sexual competition, leading to at least one species where the male has a penis longer than his overall body and a very substantial amount of duck-rape.