Lord Richard Buckley once said, “Humor is the absence of terror, and terror the absence of humor.” The obvious exception: animal attack stories, which can turn terror cartoonish, and excuse paranoia as comedy. I was especially amused 2 nights ago by the latest special on the Discovery channel, “Land of Lost Monsters,” which chronicles the various ways pre-historic, crudely CG-rendered, mega-beasts might have attacked humans. I missed the Demon Duck of Doom segment, but I did catch segmemts on the Giant Ground Sloth, the Moa, and the Haast Eagle.

Haast Eagles mainly dined on Moa, but might also have snacked on people. According to the BBC’s “Wildfacts,”

Fossil moa bones show us how the eagle used its beak after it had caught its prey: it used the elongated beak to open up the carcass and reach inside to grab mouthfuls of organs such as the kidneys. When people arrived in New Zealand, the eagle may have mistaken them for moa and thus attacked and eaten them.

If you’re adequately educated, that passage may remind you of Prometheus and the eagle who made a daily feast of his organs; but if you’re me, the passage reminds you/me of my April blog entry about evil birds, and their secret desire to rule the world.

What? You don’t think they want to?

Here’s some recent news reports on the evil of birds:

• Battling the bird: “Something’s afoul at the Lazzarotto Mobile Home Park, as residents find themselves caught in a daily showdown with an ornery wild turkey.”
  
• Postman copes with bird attacks: “A postman is having to deal with a different kind of animal attacker during his rounds in north Devon.”
  
• Pheasant is unpleasant to postman: “Geoffrey Sandles, who calls the bird Psycho, said it had ambushed him several times in Withington, Gloucestershire.”
  
• Nervous Blackbirds Dive-Bomb 24th Street Pedestrians: “Neighborhood residents have begun to look over their shoulders while withdrawing cash from the Washington Mutual ATMs at the corner of Noe and 24th streets.”
  
• Twitchers watch robin served rare: “Birdwatchers from all over Britain who gathered in Grimsby to catch sight of a rare American robin were horrified to see it eaten by a passing sparrowhawk.”
  
• Police pull drunk bird: “Police in Germany caught a crow that had been attacking pedestrians by getting the bird drunk on schnapps.”
  
• Huge bird attacks jogger: “One of JRC’s most famous athletes, Sergio Bertelli, was attacked by an enraged buzzard as he ran through the notorious ‘bosco del prete’ in Ispra.”
  
• Mixed-up bird attacking cars: “The prime suspect in a vandalism spree in Bloomingdale has red hair, a prominent nose, and stands about a foot tall. Police haven’t been able to catch him because he flies away so quickly after committing his crimes.”

Stranger, yet, are accounts of a sighting of a mega-bird in Southern Alaska:

A recent sighting of the mystery bird occurred Oct. 10 when Moses Coupchiak, a 43-year-old heavy equipment operator from Togiak, 40 miles west of Manokotak, saw the bird flying toward him from about two miles away as he worked his tractor.

“At first I thought it was one of those old-time Otter planes,” Coupchiak said. “Instead of continuing toward me, it banked to the left, and that’s when I noticed it wasn’t a plane.”

The bird was “something huge,” he said. “The wing looks a little wider than the Otter’s, maybe as long as the Otter plane.”

The bird flew behind a hill and disappeared. Coupchiak got on the radio and warned people in Togiak to tell their children to stay away.

Pilot John Bouker said he was highly skeptical of reports of “this great big eagle” that is two or three times the size of a bald eagle. “I didn’t put any thought into it.”

But early this week while flying into Manokotak, Bouker, owner of Bristol Bay Air Service, looked out his left window and 1,000 feet away, “there’s this big … . bird,” he said.

More links: Evidence of the Giant Birds, Bird Attacks, Spring infects birds with strange kamikaze-itis, Daphne du Maurier’s “The Birds,” Evil Birds (1987) (USA) (video title)