If the royals were birds, what would they be?
Introducing the cast: the pedophile, the bald king, the ginger, and the black-and-white commoner
What a week it’s been for the British media! In Singapore, I woke up to the news last Thursday that Queen Elizabeth II had died. It’s been a whole week since then, and the news is still abuzz about her death and legacy. I was initially confused, because like Yzma proclaimed in the Emperor’s New Groove: She ain’t getting any deader!
But I thought, why not write a little something about the royal family - in bird form, of course!
The Pedophile:
And we’re off to a saucy start! First, let’s set the scene a little.
If you’re interested, you can read about the royal family’s troubling connection to Jeffrey Epstein, a charged (and now dead) sex offender and financier who purportedly trafficked girls - many of them underaged - to high-powered people.
Part of that list of high-powered people supposedly includes Prince Andrew, who was accused sexually abusing one Virginia Giuffre when she was a teenager, twenty-odd years ago. Giuffre’s suit alleges that she was pimped to Andrew by the prince’s former friend Jeffrey Epstein. Prince Andrew is Queen Elizabeth II’s third child, and a brother of the now King Charles.
Of course, this is just stuff I found off the Internet. I’m not saying it’s true or false - I’m just saying, if this were true, the best bird to represent a pedophile would be… perhaps the Adelie Penguin?
The ‘disgusting’ sex lives of the Adelie penguin
One of the first people to have ever studied the Adelie Penguin was physician George Murray Levick, who spent twelve weeks observing a very large colony of Adélie Penguins on Cape Adare in Antarctica.
When he returned to England, he published two books on the penguins, detailing their lives, behaviour, and much more! But he left out an important aspect of Adélie Penguin biology - their sexual habits! That was because he was so appalled, so disgusting, so blown-away by the depravity of the Adelie Penguins, that he couldn’t bring himself to write about and publish such behaviour.
Indeed, Adelie Penguins have been found to practice all kinds of sexual behaviors that this George guy found too disgusting to recount. They forcibly copulated with dead females, with chicks (!!) and their own offspring (!!!), and males bonked other males as well as living but resistant females. They also practiced autoerotic behavior, with males sometimes ejaculating spontaneously onto the ice.
I don’t know if Prince Andrew, or any other royal, has a habit of copulating with dead females, but the act of mating with chicks sure foots the bill of a pedophile.
It’s a common misconception that mental illnesses and mental disorders such as pedophilia only affects humans. In reality, many other animals in the natural world have been recorded engaging in unbecoming behaviour.
Sexual coercion (a lighter form of rape perhaps) has been recorded in multiple animal species such as lambs - their instinct to breed can cause them to kill the young ewe when a group of males keep chasing and raping the female until it dies when the males are on heat, wolves - males will try to mate with any female in the vicinity, including young family members, and even, of course, birds!
What’s the moral of all this? Don’t take your morality from animals. Really. The animal kingdom is a fascinating study of nature, but not a source of human morality.
Moving on!
On a lighter note, let’s look at a bald king: the King Vulture!
Okay, first of all, the current King of England isn’t bald - just a little pink, and wrinkly. Instead, we’re talking about the future King of England today, the once-handsome-now-bald Prince William!
They may be called Kings, but there’s nothing royal about the way they look (except, I suppose, their bald-headed likeness to the future King?)
There are some theories on how the king vulture earned the "king" part of its common name.
Like all vultures, the King Vulture is a scavenger - but their large size means they are often the bird that makes the first cut into a fresh carcass. One theory is that the name is a reference to its habit of displacing smaller vultures from a carcass and eating its fill while they wait. It seems the people who named this birds we not fans of the royal family, then.
The ginger: a rare, almost unknown species of Currisaucious Seagull
In 2019, a very, very rare bird was spotted in England for the first time since 1769. It was huge - larger than a crow, and perhaps the size of a hawk, with fierce yellow eyes and a sharp beak that spooked young children. And it was a vivid, bright orange - brighter than any Currisaucious ever recorded! What was this rare bird? A previously thought extinct species? A new subspecies? A cross between Prince Harry and a bird?
Just kidding! It turned out to be a seagull covered in curry!
A "bright orange" bird that was rescued by concerned members of the public turned out to be a seagull covered in curry or turmeric. The herring gull was spotted on the A41 and taken to Tiggywinkles Wildlife Hospital in Haddenham, Buckinghamshire.
A common, black-and-white bird: a Magpie
True to Meghan Markle’s roots as a ‘commoner’, we have the Magpie: perhaps one of the most common black and white birds in the UK.
They have mostly black and white feathers covering their bodies, but their tails and wings also have bluey, green, purple iridescent feathers too. Their beautiful iridescent wing and tail feathers are the easiest way to identify a magpie.
Unrelated to Meghan: let’s explore how these birds got their common name!
The prefix "mag-" is short for "Margaret", a common female name. Known for its noisy chattering, the European Magpie may have acquired its name as an allusion to nagging… like a woman (it hurts me to type such an unfeminist statement). Or, it could have also been named after "Maggot" because it stole eggs and nestlings from other birds.
The word "pie" is the original name of the bird, from the Latin pica.
And, did you know? The common magpie is one of the most intelligent birds recorded to have ever existed! Their brain-to-body-mass ratio is outmatched only by that of humans and equals that of aquatic mammals and great apes. Magpies have shown the ability to make and use tools, imitate human speech, grieve, play games, and work in teams.
Smart and savvy - just like one Miss Markle!