Tag: wild birds

160 best bird puns and bird jokes to make you twitter – Growing Family

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Are you looking for family-friendly jokes and clever puns with a feathered theme? This bumper list of bird puns and bird jokes has all you need to get everyone smiling.

As well as being good for a giggle, these funny bird puns and jokes about birds make perfect bird captions for instagram and social media (make sure you check out my nature hashtags copy and paste lists to save time there too). Birds puns and birds jokes also come in handy for greetings cards, school nature projects, and cute lunchbox notes for the kids.

The best puns about birds and bird jokes

Ready to dive into the bird-themed silliness?

Read on for a flock of kid-friendly bird puns and funny bird jokes that will quack you up (two hilarious bird puns in one sentence there 😉 )

You could also have a go at making my homemade bird feeders with the kids. This is a nice way to extend the bird-themed fun, and will also encourage your local feathered friends to visit your garden.

Funny jokes about birds

Share these funny jokes about birds with the kids for lots of giggles.

When should you buy a bird? When it goes cheep.

What do you call a parrot that flew away? A polygon.

What did the duck say when he dropped the dishes? “I hope I didn’t quack any”. (head this way for more duck jokes)

Why do hummingbirds hum? Because they don’t know the words.

What species of bird works at a building site? A crane.

What do birds like to put in their soup? Crow-tons.

What’s it called when it’s raining ducks and geese? Fowl weather.

Where do birds invest their money? In the stork market.

What do you call an eagle with a fever? An ill eagle.

Did you hear the joke about the broken egg? “Yes, it cracked me up.”

What do you call a sad bird? A bluebird.

What is even smarter than a talking bird? A spelling bee. (more bee jokes here)

What did the bird say when he forgot to revise for his test? “I’ll just wing it.”

What do you call a funny chicken? A comedi-hen.

How does a bird with a broken wing land safely? With its sparrow chute.

What kind of birds do you usually find locked up? Jail birds.

What’s a parrot’s favourite game? Hide and speak.

Why do birds fly south in the winter? Because it’s too far to walk.

How do chickens get strong? They do eggs-ercise.

What do you call two birds in love? Tweethearts.

Where do crows go for a drink? To the crow bar.

Did you hear the one about the crow and the telephone pole? He wanted to make a long distance caw.

Why did the chicken join a band? Because it had the drumsticks.

What’s a duck’s favourite snack? Quackers.

What do you give a bird with bird flu? Medical tweetment.

How do you catch a unique bird? Unique up on it.

What do you call a group of chickens playing hide and seek? Fowl play.

What type of books do owls like? Hoot-dunnits.

Which birds are always depressed? Bluebirds.

What do you call an owl who’s all mixed up? Low.

What type of birds spend lots of time on their knees? Birds of prey.

How do crows stick together in a flock? Velcrow.

What do you get if you kiss a bird? A peck on the cheek.

What bird film won an Oscar? Lord of the Wings.

What kind of bird can carry the most weight? The crane.

What type of books do snowy owls like to read? Hooo-dunnits.

Why can’t birds play baseball? Because they’re always ducking or hitting fowl balls.

What’s a bird’s favourite time of day? Cockatiel hour.

Silly bird jokes for kids

Kids love a silly joke, and these birds jokes are definitely quackers!

Why did the chicken cross the playground? Because it wanted to get to the other slide.

What’s black and white and black and white and black and white? A penguin falling down the stairs.

What do you give to a sick bird? Tweetment.

Where do royal birds live? Duckingham Palace.

What did the tree say to the woodpecker? Leaf me alone!

Why did the little bird get into trouble at school? Because he was caught tweeting on a test.

What do owls sing when it rains? Too wet to woo.

What did the ill chicken say? I’ve got people-pox!

Why did the bird fly into the library? Because he was looking for bookworms.

Where do ducks go when they are sick? To the duck-tor.

What’s a bird’s favourite game? Beakaboo.

What do you call a group of chickens dancing? Poultry in motion.

Where does a peacock go when it loses its tail? A re-tail store.

What do you call an owl dressed in armour? A knight owl.

Why didn’t the night owl go to the funeral? He wasn’t a mourning person.

What bird can you buy at the grocery store? A kiwi.

Why did the chicken cross the road, roll in mud, then cross the road again? He was a dirty double crosser.

What do you call a rude bird? A mockingbird.

Which bird is always out of breath? A puffin.

What does a cat call a hummingbird? Fast food.

What has webbed feet and fangs? Count Duckula.

How many birds does it take to change a lightbulb? Toucan do it.

What do you get if you cross a firework with a duck? A firequacker.

What do you call a man with a seagull on his head? Cliff.

Why did the pelican get kicked out of the restaurant? Because he had a very big bill.

What bird is helpful at mealtimes? A swallow.

What is an owl’s favourite Beatles song? Owl you need is love.

Why did the bird join the musical? Because it had perfect pitch.

What do you call an owl with a low voice? A growl.

Why don’t birds take sides in politics? Because they appreciate both left and right wings.

What do you call a penguin in the desert? Lost.

Which bird always gets first place? A peng-win.

What’s a bird’s favourite kind of maths? Owlgebra.

What do chickens do on sunny afternoons? They have peck-nics.

Why do seagulls like living by the sea? Because if they lived by the bay they’d be baygulls.

What’s the difference between a fly and a bird? A bird can fly, but a fly can’t bird.

What steals your toys while you’re in the bath? A robber ducky.

What happens when lovebirds break up? They turn into bluebirds.

Why didn’t the rooster cross the road? Because it was chicken.

What kind of bird doesn’t need a comb? A bald eagle.

Why do owls get invited to parties? Because they’re a hoot.

What do you call a duck who’s always telling jokes? A wise quacker.

Knock knock bird jokes

Try a knock knock bird joke to get kids thinking.

Knock, knock. Who’s there? Baby Owl. Baby Owl who? Baby owl see you later, maybe I won’t!

Knock, knock. Who’s there? Kuck. Kuck who? Don’t call me cuckoo!

Knock, knock. Who’s there? Twit. Twit who? Help, an owl!

Knock, knock. Who’s there? Earl. Earl who? Early bird catches the worm!

Knock, knock. Who’s there? Goose. Goose who? Goose who it is!

Knock, knock. Who’s there? Hoo. Hoo who? Mum, there’s an owl at the door!

Knock, knock. Who’s there? Toucan. Toucan who? Toucan play that game!

Knock, knock. “Who’s there?” Owl. “Owl who?” Owl be seeing you!

Funny puns about birds

There are so many ways to crack (or should that be quack?) a bird pun, and you don’t have to be a bird lover to enjoy them. Here are some of my favourites.

We are not emu-sed

Going cheep

Tweetie pie

Under the feather

Owl you need is love

Happy bird-day to you

Quack the case

I’m hooting for you

Poultry in motion

Eggs-citing

Nice to tweet you

That bird joke flew right over your head

Feather forecast

Quack me up

I’ve been waiting owl day

Beak careful

Very un-pheasant

A pheasant surprise

Winging it

Do you have a sparrow minute?

Don’t let anyone clip your wings

You’re a real hoot

Love birds

Egg-cellent bird puns that are a real hoot

Bird enthusiasts will love these silly bird puns.

Owl night long

A heavy birden

Caw me on my cellphone

Stork raven mad

Crow away

One fowl swoop

You’re owl-some

Wise quacks

Im-peck-able

Toucan play that game

I’m feeling emu-tional

Like feather, like son

That’s ill-eagle

Carry your birden

Bird on the street

Quite ostrich

Let’s ruffle some feathers

Very emu-sing

Stop mocking-bird me

Get your heron checked

Put a wing on it

Tweet dreams

Owl you need is love

Irritable owl syndrome

More bird puns

You’re so tweet

Fowl play

Crowing, crowing, gone

A chirp off the old block

I think you’re dove-ly

Season’s tweetings

Owl by myself

Going quackers

No egrets

Tweetheart

This is hawkward

Bird puns fly right over my head

It’s been a ruff day

Let’s parrot-y

Fowl ball

Keep pecking away

I’m talon you

You’re such a comedi-hen

I know the early bird gets the worm, but that’s just too much to swallow.

That’s hawk-ward

Owl or nothing

Nip it in the budgerigar

Fowl language

A little bird told me

Don’t caw me, I’ll caw you

Share your favourite bird jokes and puns about birds!

I hope this list of bird jokes and bird puns for kids has generated chirps of laughter and plenty of material for nature-themed laughs. If your favourite bird joke or best bird pun isn’t included, please share it in the comments section so we can all enjoy it 🙂

More nature-themed fun

If you like exploring nature with the kids – or just want to try and do it more often – my book *A Year of Nature Craft & Play is a great resource. It’s filled with 52 nature activities, games and crafts – one for every week of the year – all with easy-to-follow instructions and lots of colourful pictures to get kids engaged and excited. Find out more about it in my post on nature play.

More family-friendly jokes, puns and quotes

I’ve got a whole host of nature-inspired lists of family-friendly jokes and puns for you to explore. There are flower puns and flower jokes, nature puns, plant puns and plant jokes, bee jokes and bee puns, fish puns, cow jokes, bear puns, sunflower puns, ice puns, rock puns, garden puns and garden jokes, gnome puns, cat puns, tree puns and tree jokes, fruit puns and fruit jokes, bean jokes and puns, vegetable puns and vegetable jokes, potato puns and potato jokes, spring puns, Easter jokes, summer jokes, fall puns and fall jokes, art jokes and puns, pumpkin jokes and pumpkin puns, skull puns and Halloween jokes for kids (bookmark these last three for Halloween). And finally, my Christmas jokes for kids are ideal for a good laugh during the festive season.

There’s also a whole series of quotes blog posts that you might like to check out. As well as being a lovely source of nature inspiration, you can use them in your social media posts. There are nature quotes and nature captions, flower quotes, gardening quotes, tree quotes, quotes about sunflowers and waterfall quotes to enjoy.

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Catherine

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August 1, 2024
We Have a Mink Problem

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Bird flu, at this point, is somewhat of a misnomer. The virus, which primarily infects birds, is circulating uncontrolled around much of the world, devastating not just birds but wide swaths of the animal kingdom. Foxes, bobcats, and pigs have fallen ill. Grizzly bears have gone blind. Sea creatures, including seals and sea lions, have died in great numbers.

But none of the sickened animals has raised as much concern as mink. In October, a bird-flu outbreak erupted at a Spanish mink farm, killing thousands of the animals before the rest were culled. It later became clear that the virus had spread between the animals, picking up a mutation that helped it thrive in mammals. It was likely the first time that mammal-to-mammal spread drove a huge outbreak of bird flu. Because mink are known to spread certain viruses to humans, the fear was that the disease could jump from mink to people. No humans got sick from the outbreak in Spain, but other infections have spread from mink to humans before: In 2020, COVID outbreaks on Danish mink farms led to new mink-related variants that spread to a small number of humans.

As mammals ourselves, we have good reason to be concerned. Outbreaks on crowded mink farms are an ideal scenario for bird flu to mutate. If, in doing so, it picks up the ability to spread between humans, it could potentially start another global pandemic. “There are many reasons to be concerned about mink,” Tom Peacock, a flu researcher at Imperial College London, told me. Right now, mink are a problem we can’t afford to ignore.

For two animals with very different body types, mink and humans have some unusual similarities. Research suggests that we share similar receptors for COVID, bird flu, and human flu, through which these viruses can gain entry into our bodies. The numerous COVID outbreaks on mink farms during the early pandemic, and the bird-flu outbreak in Spain, gravely illustrate this point. It’s “not surprising” that mink can get these respiratory diseases, James Lowe, a veterinary-medicine professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told me. Mink are closely related to ferrets, which are so well known for their susceptibility to human flu that they’re the go-to model for flu research.

Mink wouldn’t get sick as often, and wouldn’t be as big an issue for humans, if we didn’t keep farming them for fur in the perfect conditions for outbreaks. Many barns used to raise mink are partially open-air, making it easy for infected wild birds to come in contact with the animals, sharing not only air but potentially food. Mink farms are also notoriously cramped: The Spanish farm, for example, kept tens of thousands of mink in about 30 barns. Viral transmission would be all but guaranteed in those conditions, but the animals are especially vulnerable. Because mink are normally solitary creatures, they face significant stress in packed barns, which may further predispose them to disease, Angela Bosco-Lauth, a biomedical-sciences professor at Colorado State University, told me. And because they’re often inbred so their coats look alike, an entire population may share a similar genetic susceptibility to disease. The frequency of outbreaks among mink, Bosco-Lauth said, “may actually have less to do with the animals and more to do with the fact that we raise them in the same way … we would an intensive cattle farm or chickens.”

So far, there’s no evidence that mink from the Spanish farm spread bird flu to humans: None of the workers tested positive for the virus, and since then, no other mink farms have reported outbreaks. “We’re just not very susceptible” to bird flu, Lowe said. Our bird-flu receptors are tucked deep in our lungs, but when we’re exposed, most of the virus gets caught in the nose, throat, and other parts of the upper respiratory tract. This is why bird-flu infection is less common in people but is often pneumonia-level severe when it does happen. Indeed, a few humans have gotten sick and died from bird flu in the 27 years that the current strain of bird flu, known as H5N1, has circulated. This month, a girl in Cambodia died from the virus after potentially encountering a sick bird. The more virus circulating in an environment, the higher the chances a person will get infected. “It’s a dose thing,” Lowe said.

But our susceptibility to bird flu could change. Another mink outbreak would give the virus more opportunities to keep mutating. The worry is that this could create a new variant that’s better at binding to the human flu receptors in our upper respiratory tract, Stephanie Seifert, a professor at Washington State University who studies zoonotic pathogens, told me. If the virus gains the ability to infect the nose and throat, Peacock, at Imperial College London, said, it would be better at spreading. Those mutations “would worry us the most.” Fortunately, the mutations that arose on the Spanish mink farm “were not as bad as many of us worried about,” he added, “but that doesn’t mean that the next time this happens, this will also be the case.”

Because mink carry the receptors for both bird flu and human flu, they could serve as “mixing vessels” for the viruses to combine, researchers wrote in 2021. (Ferrets, pigs, and humans share this quality too.) Through a process called reassortment, flu viruses can swap segments of their genome, resulting in a kind of Frankenstein pathogen. Although viruses remixed in this way aren’t necessarily more dangerous, they could be, and that’s not a risk worth taking. “The previous three influenza pandemics all arose due to mixing between avian and human influenza viruses,” Peacock said.

While there are good reasons to be concerned about mink, it is hard to gauge just how concerned we should be—especially given what we still don’t know about this changing virus. After the death of the young girl in Cambodia, the World Health Organization called the global bird flu situation “worrying,” while the CDC maintains that the risk to the public is low. Lowe said “it’s certainly not very risky” that bird flu will spill over into humans, but is worth keeping an eye on. H5N1 bird flu is not new, he added, and it hasn’t affected people en masse yet. But the virus has already changed in ways that make it better at infecting wild birds, and as it spreads in the wild, it may continue to change to better infect mammals, including humans. “We don’t understand enough to make strong predictions of public-health risk,” Jonathan Runstadler, an infectious-diseases professor at Tufts University, told me.

As bird flu continues to spread among birds and in domestic and wild animal populations, it will only become harder to control. The virus, formally seasonal, is already present year-round in parts of Europe and Asia, and it is poised to do the same in the Americas. Breaking the chain of transmission is vital to preventing another pandemic. An important step is to avoid situations where humans, mink, or any other animal could be infected with both human and bird flu at the same time.

Since the COVID outbreaks, mink farms have generally beefed up their biosecurity: Farm workers are often required to wear masks and protective gear, such as disposable overalls. To limit the risk to mink—and other susceptible hosts—farms need to reduce their size and density, reduce contact between mink and wild birds, and monitor the virus, Runstadler said. Some nations, including Mexico, Ecuador, have recently embraced bird-flu vaccines for poultry in light of the outbreaks. H5N1 vaccines are also available for humans, though they aren’t readily available. Still, one of the most obvious options is to shut mink farms down. “We probably should have done that after SARS-CoV-2,” Bosco-Lauth, at Colorado State, said. Doing so is controversial, however, because the global mink industry is valuable, with a huge market in China. Denmark, which produces up to 40 percent of the world’s mink pelts, temporarily banned mink breeding in 2020 after a spate of COVID outbreaks, but the ban expired last month, and farms are returning, albeit in a limited capacity.

But mink are far from the only animal that poses a bird-flu risk to humans. “Frankly, with what we’re seeing with other wildlife species, there really aren’t any mammals that I would discount at this point in time,” Bosco-Lauth said. Any mammal species repeatedly infected by the virus is a potential risk, including marine mammals, such as seals. But we should be most concerned about the ones humans frequently come into close contact with, especially animals that are raised in high density, such as pigs, Runstadler said. This doesn’t pose just a human public-health concern, he said, but the potential for “ecological disruption.” Bird flu can be a devastating disease for wildlife, killing animals swiftly and without mercy.

Whether bird flu makes the jump into humans, it isn’t the last virus that will threaten us—or mink. The era we live in has become known as the “Pandemicene,” as my colleague Ed Yong has called it, one defined by the regular spillover of viruses into humans, caused by our disruption of the normal trajectories of viral movement in nature. Mink may never pass bird flu to us. But that doesn’t mean they won’t be a risk the next time a novel influenza or coronavirus comes around. Doing nothing about mink essentially means choosing luck as a public-health strategy. Sooner or later, it will run out.

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Yasmin Tayag

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February 28, 2023
U.S. to Test Vaccine in Poultry as Bird Flu Deaths Rise

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Feb. 10, 2023 — The Biden administration will test a vaccine that could be given to poultry to counter the current bird flu outbreak that has killed about 58 million birds, mostly in commercial poultry flocks.

These would be the first vaccine given to poultry to protect against avian influenza in years. Poultry are already vaccinated for diseases like infectious bronchitis, and shots have been licensed for past outbreaks.

“The decision to proceed with vaccination is complex, and many factors must be considered before implementing a vaccination strategy,” U.S. Department of Agriculture spokesperson Mike Stepien said in a statement. Stepien said the USDA is “soliciting input from many different industry stakeholders that would be impacted.”

The USDA reported this week that 58 million birds, mostly in commercially raised poultry, have died in the outbreak, either from the virus or because they were put down to prevent transmission within a flock. Every state has found bird flu in wild birds, and 47 states have found it in poultry flocks, including 18 states in the last 30 days, the USDA said.

In addition to domestic poultry, bird flu has been detected in mink in Spain, sea lions in Peru and now, in a Colorado mountain lion, black bear, and skunk, TheDenver Post reported.

The CDC says the current outbreak of avian influenza (HPAI A(H5)) began in January 2022. That was the first time it was detected in the U.S. since 2016.

The tests will help determine if the vaccines are a good match against the current strain of bird flu. Officials have been concerned that giving birds the vaccine could hurt American poultry exports.

“What is the trigger point of when you might use vaccination?” poultry veterinarian David Swayne, a former USDA’s official, said to CBS News. “And that’s what they’re looking at. Is it so many birds in a poultry farm in an area getting infected? Or is it a certain amount of economic loss? Or is it because a neighboring state has the virus in poultry, and you’re concerned? So there’s those are really the tough, tough questions.”

The bird flu outbreak is one of the causes of the increase in egg prices at the grocery store.

A man in Colorado who tested positive for bird flu is the only human case in the current outbreak, the CDC said. He recovered. Seasonal flu shots will not prevent infection from bird flu but can cut the chances of getting sick with human and bird flu viruses at the same time, the CDC says.

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February 10, 2023