Talk:List of fictional birds

Untitled

Is Thorondor himself an eagle? -- Timwi 00:47 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Ah, yes, he is [1]. -- Timwi 00:49 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)

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Regarding Sonny and Toucan Sam... they're on television and they're not real... sounds like they belong in the List of fictional birds to me...

If you disagree, please explain why first, rather than just removing them again. --Dante Alighieri 18:59 20 Jun 2003 (UTC)

They should stay - I performed extra research to determine Sonny's species! :)) -- Timwi 20:43 20 Jun 2003 (UTC)

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Owl (friend of Winnie-the-Pooh) is mentioned twice: once under Literature and again under Disney. At the very least one of the entries needs to be slightly different. Phil 13:04, Dec 8, 2003 (UTC)

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Anyone have the works of Liam O'Flaherty? They should be a good source.

I think T. H. White's Archimedes is a tawny owl. Can anyone confirm?

Are medieval beast fables literature or folklore?

--JerryFriedman 01:32, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)

What exactly is this list meant to be?

Is it a list of "fictional birds" (birds that aren't real) or "birds in fiction" (real birds used in books, songs, etc.)? There needs to be two lists.

Five17 18:47, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

I second this emotion. Ravens and owls are not "fictional birds". Specific individuals of species would qualify, as would species that are made up. I tbink it's probably POV to classify birds from religion as "fictional" because a great many people believe them to be literally real. Applejuicefool 16:24, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

What's with the "extinct" tabs on all those sports teams ?

The Pittsburgh Penguins still exist

Comments on recent removal of certain links

• Bagucks in Chippewa mythology

Is it really a bird. It is no where made clear on the Bagucks article, where it is referred to as a spirit.

I ran a google search, got 200+ links, but all of them either refer to a list similar to one in the article or start off as "Bagucks is a mischievous spirit, a skeletal bird ...". Could not find a good source of information. If you have one please mention it in the references.

I don't think it is a bird at all, though it flies. The word bakaak in the Anishinaabe language means "skeleton" or "extremely thin". Now, there are several similar sounding phomes also at play here: /bagak=/ indicates "clear" or "concise" or "plainly"; /baagaakw=/ indicates "pounding" or "milling"; /baakaak=/ indicates "opening"; and /bakaak=/ indicates "thinness". In the typical aadizookaan regarding Bakaak, all four phomes are used in making the point of the story. CJLippert 17:24, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

• Firebird in Native American mythologies

The link takes you to the disambiguation page. Please fix the link if possible.

myth 04:09, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

This shouldn't be a list of FICTIONAL birds, many of them are believed in by members of certain religions or cultures. I propose changing it to mythological birds or something similar. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.233.73.251 (talk) 01:30, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

"fictional" is all kinds of wrong here

Not sure what the alternative is but "fictional" is not applying to much of this list. Birds in literature? Birds in entertainment? Famous Birds? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.110.194.35 (talk) 19:23, 10 July 2010 (UTC)

Merger proposal

I am proposing that we merge together the list of fictional birds of prey, the list of fictional ducks, and the list of fictional penguins into this main article because:

1. Birds of prey, ducks, and penguins are all birds
2. There are already over 50 hawks, falcons, owls, vultures, etc. (birds of prey) in this article as well as an entire subsection called "birds of prey"
3. There are already 18 ducks in this article as well as an entire subsection called "ducks, swans, and geese"
4. There are already 16 penguins in this article as well as an entire subsection called "penguins"

Certainly there is an argument that the articles on birds of prey, ducks, and penguins should remain split from this parent article to avoid this article becoming entirely too long. However if this split is to be retained then we will have to rename this article "List of fictional birds (other)" and we will have to remove all of the birds of prey, ducks, and penguins to avoid redundancy. At this point I am leaning toward the first option (i.e. a merger). Are there any thoughts on the matter? -Thibbs (talk) 21:40, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

• Regarding the duck and penguin pages, it seems like it would be way too long if those pages were merged in. I'd recommend just putting a "Main article:" line in the ducks and penguins sections, pointing them to the respective pages, and moving any (non-duplicate) entries from here to those pages. Same with the owls. The birds of prey, maybe that could get merged in. Any more than that, though, and it seems like it would embiggen the fictional birds page to the point that people would be discussing a split. Just my 2¢. 28bytes (talk) 22:00, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

• I add my 2 cents to his, agreeing with 28bytes. Bearian (talk) 22:18, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

• Thanks for the quick responses. I have started to go through all of the "List of fictional Animal-X" articles and repair them. I have completed work on List of fictional animals (other) and I believe I have greatly improved it (see my recent work there). For the most part all of these articles are filled with non-notable entries (either redlinked or unlinked) and large amounts of duplication. So I strongly suspect that the lists of ducks and penguins will be greatly reduced in size by some much-needed cleanup. Perhaps the merger suggestion is premature. Anyway I think we should still keep an open mind toward the idea pending these cleanups. I'll notify all respondents from this thread as soon as I have finished cutting the unhelpful portions of those articles. Keep the comments coming, though. Cheers. -Thibbs (talk) 22:26, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

OK I've now removed all easily-identifiable cruft from the list of fictional penguins, list of fictional birds of prey, and list of fictional ducks. I suppose to be fair I should also mention that I've removed all cruft from list of fictional owls as well since I have also proposed that the owl article be merged into the bird of prey article. I am not quite finished, however. I think that my initial proposal to merge all bird articles together should await my cleanup of "list of fictional birds" which may take me a good bit of time. Anyway I will write to the talk pages of all respondents to this discussion when I have finished the list of fictional birds cleanup. Cheers. -Thibbs (talk) 15:12, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

I'm now satisfied that the articles under discussion are in as good a shape as can "easily" be achieved. So I think it's time to re-open discussions about merging. As things stand currently, this article is 14,743 bytes in size. The sizes for the other lists are:

• List of fictional penguins - 4,936 bytes (corrected to 4,139 if lede, all headers, and other markup is removed)
• List of fictional owls - 4,054 bytes (presumably correctable to around 3,257 as above)
• List of fictional birds of prey - 3,912 bytes (presumably correctable to around 3,115 as above)
• List of fictional ducks - 12,269 bytes (presumably correctable to around 11,472 as above)

If all lists were merged together we'd have a list of around 36,726 (not counting the removal of duplicate entries of which there are many). This represents an increase to this article of about 2.5x. In the interest of providing context, prior to my intervention with this article it stood at 36,688 bytes. Thus if we were to merge all articles into one (again ignoring entry duplications) it would represent a rough 38 byte increase to the article from when I first began. If all duplicate entries are removed the merged mega-article would certainly be smaller than 36,688.
Understanding all that, however, I do recognize that one of the things that prompted me to act in the first place was the massive size of some of these articles. I can see that there is an argument that some of these sections (like list of fictional ducks for example) has become so massive that it would be best to keep them as a separate article even despite the above analysis. If we are to follow this course then I believe we should de-populate the sections of this article that cover animals split from the main list (e.g. ducks) by shifting them to the split article (e.g. list of fictional ducks).
I am open to ideas about what should be done to best manage these articles. At this point the merge I feel is most warranted is the "list of fictional owls" into the "list of fictional birds of prey." It would also be helpful to discuss whether we should rename this article "list of fictional birds (other)" or use {{main}} notation (as for example under a "Ducks" subsection) to direct readers to the main articles on that topic. What do people think? -Thibbs (talk) 14:51, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

I think the byte counts might be deceptive since there are so many carriage returns included (as would be expected in any list.) For example, I've got a decent-sized monitor, but at my screen resolution the List of fictional birds page is still over 6 pages long in my browser. I think we've gone from "extremely long" to "long", but at "long" I'd be hesitant to support merging anything to List of fictional birds.

Most definitely I'm opposed to merging List of fictional ducks with/into anything, since it's 5 pages by itself. Merging List of fictional owls and List of fictional birds of prey would be fine from a page size perspective, since they're only about 2 pages each, although I'm not sure I see a compelling need for a merger there either. What problem is the merger intended to solve? 28bytes (talk) 15:15, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

Oh, and regarding "should de-populate the sections of this article that cover animals split from the main list (e.g. ducks) by shifting them to the split article (e.g. list of fictional ducks)", I support that 100%. The entries should be in one place or the other, not both. 28bytes (talk) 15:31, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

The main reason I think mergers in this area are important are to firm-up the definitions of the pages. This will reduce the potential for unhelpful duplication and the inevitable cruft generally. As it stands, characters from popular works of fiction like Harry Potter's owl Hedwig can be properly filed (according to strict biological definitions) under List of fictional owls, List of fictional birds of prey, and List of fictional birds. In fact that example is currently listed under both owls and birds. I can see three solutions:

1. merge smaller species/genera articles into larger order/family articles
2. rename the parent article as "list of X (other)" in distinction from the split articles "list of X (specific1)," "list of X (specific2)," etc.
3. keep the parent article's name intact and include subsections with {{main}} notation to redirect readers to a specific article.

To be sure the third option would be the least disruptive but I worry that some editors might not take the extra step of clicking the main link and placing their entry there. So I think Option #3 will require constant monitoring. I would favor options 1 or 2 but I am flexible and not dead-set on this. -Thibbs (talk) 15:42, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

I prefer option #3. I think no matter what is done, there will still be duplication; I'm sure you noticed that on the duck page, there were quite a few entries that were in there twice. I think having shorter standalone pages will help, as editors will be able to more easily check whether an entry they want to add is already there. Having the {{main}} lines in there will also help, as it will be (one hopes) obvious to an editor not to add an entry there but to go to the linked page instead. 28bytes (talk) 15:52, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

OK I have no real problems with this. I've written to User:Bearian as well. Let's see what he has to say on the issue. If he agrees then let's go with option #3. -Thibbs (talk) 16:16, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. Thanks for all your hard work on this. 28bytes (talk) 16:22, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

I go with Option # 3 as well. Bearian (talk) 18:05, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

Excellent. I've gone ahead and done it then. The last thing I want to do with birds is to merge the owls into the other birds of prey as discussed earlier. This should reduce confusion as neither of those articles is organized biologically and thus {{main}} tags wouldn't work very well. Thanks for all the input. -Thibbs (talk) 19:36, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

Steps toward a complete cleanup of this article

I have begun repairing this article by focusing on notability and layout. To this end I have re-drafted the lede to explicitly describe the inclusion criteria for the list (i.e. notable bird characters from fiction) and I have begun to merge the "list of birds by media form" subsections (e.g. "Birds in Comics") into the "list of birds by species" subsections. I think this is an important step to avoid the duplication that will otherwise inevitably result. For example the character of Toucan Sam can be listed as a "bird in commerce," a "Piciforme," and possibly even a "bird in film." I have decided to cut the "list of birds by media form" subsections because they are in general smaller and so the shift should be easier. I'll continue to explain some of my larger edits here to show my rationales for them. Cheers, -Thibbs (talk) 20:10, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

I have now completed my review of the bird characters presented in the list. According to WP:LIST and WP:LSC, a stand-alone list such as this should be properly defined to avoid it becoming an indiscriminate collection of information or becoming Listcruft. WP:LIST states that the definition of the list (i.e. the explicit inclusion criteria) should come in the lede paragraphe and of the three common selection criteria listed at WP:LSC, it is clear that "Every entry meets the notability criteria" makes the most sense for this article. I recently added a short lede to reflect this in keeping with the ledes of other "List of fictional animal" articles.

With that said, we now are faced with the large number of non-notable entries present in this list. While in most cases the work of fiction from which the character bird is taken is notable (or at least is presumptively notable by merit of the fact that a WP article on the work exists), the character itself is quite frequently non-notable per WP:INHERENT and thus should be removed from the list. This is not, after all, a "List of fiction about birds," but rather a "List of fictional birds." I am interested in cleaning up articles like this that have in many cases become near-complete listcruft and have consequently been nominated for deletion. In order to verify that each list entry is notable via sources would take me the rest of my life (or at least several years) and so I am operating under a set of assumptions which should vastly improve these articles. The major assumption is that if no article or subsection on the character exists then the character is non-notable. Of course this assumption is premised on the notion that all notable topics have WP articles written on them and this is clearly not the case. For that reason I have also been happy to accommodate redlinked entries that are supported by sources. The hope would be that an article would soon be written on this purportedly notable character bird in the future.

At any rate, I am now going to remove all un-sourced red-linked entries from this list which will greatly reduce its size. This large-scale removal of information can potentially alarm some editors, but please try to react calmly. I am not interested in removing notable entries so if entries I will have removed are in fact notable then I would be glad to see them re-inserted into the article provided that they have either a WP article devoted to them or a subsection devoted to them (or one that covers them substantially), or that they are supported by reliable sources. Cheers. -Thibbs (talk) 22:12, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

Daffy Duck

where is Daffy duck? --190.53.177.181 (talk) 03:55, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

He went that-a-way! 28bytes (talk) 12:29, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

A Problem

I've been noticing something strange in the Charadriiformes section. In one part, it tries to tell us about a character called "Abby", who is an avocet, but it just cuts off at "a female avocet in the". Another thing I found strange was that someone was adding in birds from a book called "Avifauna of Sardinia". Not sure about you guys, but to me that sounds more like a book about information on birds from the Italian island of Sardinia rather than a fictional story about birds from Sardinia. I've tried doing research on both of these and so far have found nothing. Hopefully someone can finish Abby's description and prove me wrong on the whole "Avifauna of Sardinia" thing. --Budgielover2988 (talk) 03:43, 31 January 2016 (UTC)

I'll see what I can find out. Worse comes to worst, we can just delete those entries altogether.--Mr Fink (talk) 04:41, 31 January 2016 (UTC)

After doing some searching, "Abby" was from a comic strip called "Krafty and Waldo," but, I could not find any trace of that alleged comic strip via google. We really need to purge this list of non-notable mentions.--Mr Fink (talk) 04:50, 31 January 2016 (UTC)

Ah, I see. I do agree with you on that, a lot of characters on the list could be considered as "non-notable" (for instance, someone mentioned a flock of seagulls from a deleted scene in Lilo and Stitch), but then again notable could be subjective, so maybe the reason why those people added them in was because they thought they were notable? It's pretty much become a giant list of bird characters at this point, whether they're notable or not, if it's a bird, then it goes on the list. The sad thing is I don't think it was originally intended to be that way. You think we should make another list of all of the minor/background bird characters to make those people happy without them "littering" the main list? --Budgielover2988 (talk) 00:17, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

By "notability," I mean the criteria listed in WP:NOTABILITY, like, for example, protagonists and deuteragonists. Plus, of course, reliable sources that would explain the notability. Unfortunately, while your suggestion is a good one, but, is ultimately futile, as other editors would not tolerate a list of non-notable fictional entities for long, and that the various editors who insist on listing non-notable characters are never (sea)gullible enough to accept such an arrangement, either. Ultimately, we're going to have to go through and purge, binge and rewrite the list.--Mr Fink (talk) 00:58, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

Ok then. Sounds like a plan. I wish good luck to you guys. Also, I liked that pun "(sea)gullible". --Budgielover2988 (talk) 02:14, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

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Jayhawks?

Where do Jayhawks go in this list?--Paul McDonald (talk) 11:11, 5 October 2018 (UTC)

Sweet Dee is confirmed to be an ostrich

Please add a new item under "Struthioniformes". The name should be "Sweet Dee" from the show "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia". This was previously listed under a different section, then removed for an unknown reason. However, it's clear from Season 13 Episode 7 "The Gang Does a Clip Show" that Sweet Dee is an ostrich and is pictured in the source below:

https://i.imgur.com/jR1FgeU.jpg

Thank you Apokusin (talk) 22:25, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

 Done AdA&D 00:51, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

Tables Instead of Bullets

There is something that I would like to address. Using bulleted lists is efficient, but I find it that they do not provide enough information. Tables provide more information, and they are efficient, too. We have tables on the pages for the list of fictional marsupials and the list of fictional primates. I would propose replacing the bulleted lists on this article with tables.

Under each section, the tables would provide the name of the bird, its species, the title of the work it originated from and additional notes. Other data needed for specific media types will be included in the tables, too (for instance, in "Birds in literature," the tables would mention the book's author). The additional notes should only be brief summaries or notes regarding the work mentioned in the row.

Does anybody else think that the bulleted lists should be replaced with tables? --Uptherial (talk) 03:48, 20 November 2020 (UTC)

The Angry Birds are of different species, not a collective one.

This page lists the Angry Birds together as if they are a single species. Many officially licensed books have revealed the true species of some of the characters, such as Red being a desert cardinal, and Stella being a galah. I mean, in the page for fictional birds of prey, Mighty Eagle and Silver have separate entries. That must also be applied here.

SquidwardTentacools

06:21, 3 September 2022 (UTC)