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If you were to ask me - and I’m not suggesting that anyone has - birds are pretty much the stupidest animals on the face of the Earth. I say this for one reason only. Birds have the ability to fly, way up high above all known forms of ground traffic ever invented by man, and yet they still manage to get hit by cars.

My carpool buddies and I were heading in to work on Friday morning, when out of nowhere, this huge black bird - we believe it was some kind of vulture - launches itself from the side of the road and takes flight. Very majestic and graceful and all, right? Sure it was, all the way up until it decided that the best course to fly would be directly in front of our car. Needless to say, it had a bit of a run-in with the front windshield. Fortunately for my friend, who was sitting in the passenger seat at the time, the glass remained intact and the bird did not end up doing a deer-through-the-windshield routine. That could have been messy. He (my friend) would have had to go home and change his pants, probably.

Of course, the first question out of everyone’s mouth is “How does a bird get hit by a car?” I responded by saying “Obviously you’ve never been to Tucson.” In Tucson (Arizona), there are flattened birds all over the place. Mostly pigeons. This is because pigeons have the collective brain capacity of toe scum. Pigeons don’t remember they can fly until you are literally about 5 feet from them. Then the signal that a car is coming finally reaches the pea that is their brain, and a zygote of a thought that maybe the pigeon should move out of the way barely has time to enter the nervous system when the bird gets turned into a pigeon pancake.

This happens all over in Tucson.

I used to live in an apartment complex very close to where a woman would feed birdseed to pigeons every day from her driveway. The problem was this woman would feed them at the end of her driveway, which meant that the birdseed ended up in the street. Which meant that 16 gajillion birds would be in the road, all not realizing that they are being run over by cars because they are too busy trying to find the seed, which is hidden below the seething mass of feathers and edible body parts. My wife had to drive through this hoard of feathered meat and bird poop whenever she had to go to the store or run other errands, and she always got dirty looks from the old lady supplying the food.

Lady, if you’re reading this blog, here’s a hint: if you don’t want your birds to get run over by cars, don’t throw their food into the street!

I know all you bird lovers out there are unsheathing your machetes - I can hear them being drawn out. Please put them back. I don’t mean to say that all birds are bad. Just the ones that are stupid enough to get hit by cars. I’m sure there are animals out there that are much dumber than birds, though to be honest I can’t think of any (see update below). Birds certainly have their place in history. After all, it was a dove that brought back a sign of land back in the day of Noah and that ark of his. And several of my best good friends are named after birds. But you can’t deny that a bird that gets hit by a car is pretty ironic, nor can you deny that Pigeon Pancake might be a good name for a rock band.

Update: The only thing dumber than pigeons, in my book, are rabbits. Especially the stupid little rabbits that think they can make it across the street when you are only 3 feet away from them in a car speeding at 60 MPH. They’re the ones that don’t make it into their little rabbit clubs.