Every week, it seems, we get another angry letter (sent via carrier pigeon) from a livid ornithologist. “Why do you never cover any bird-related news?” they demand. “This is avian erasure!” they scream at us in vitriolic voicemails. “Would it kill you to write a list of the best bills and beaks?” they wonder, irritatedly. Look, I’ll freely admit that our ornithological content hasn’t been the best, especially since we had to shelve our bird-focused sister site, Featherly, because of that lawsuit thing. But I hope we can make up for it, at least a bit, with this fascinating bit of news about how a family of Robins have made a new Ford F-250 temporarily immobile.
The reason the 2026 F-250 at Olathe Ford Lincoln in Olathe, Kansas can’t be moved is because a seemingly truck-appreciating (or possibly just a Ford fan) robin has made a very cozy-looking nest on the front passenger-side wheel of the F-250, quite comfortably ensconced inside the wheel well.
Video and photos of the nest show a very well-constructed bird dwelling, which housed four lovely blue eggs that soon hatched into four hungry, baby robins.
The reason the nest can’t just be moved off the tire and placed somewhere else, say, the wheel well of a lower-margin Ford like an Escape or a used Tempo, is because the Federal Government will not stand for that kind of nonsense.
Yes, thanks to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, the American Robin (turdus migratorius, and stop laughing back there, I can hear you) is on the list of protected birds (you can check the full list here if you don’t believe me) that cannot be bothered or interfered with in any way. As the treaty states:
Unless and except as permitted by regulations made as hereinafter provided in this subchapter, it shall be unlawful at any time, by any means or in any manner, to pursue, hunt, take, capture, kill, attempt to take, capture, or kill, possess, offer for sale, sell, offer to barter, barter, offer to purchase, purchase, deliver for shipment, ship, export, import, cause to be shipped, exported, or imported, deliver for transportation, transport or cause to be transported, carry or cause to be carried, or receive for shipment, transportation, carriage, or export, any migratory bird, any part, nest, or egg of any such bird, or any product, whether or not manufactured, which consists, or is composed in whole or part, of any such bird or any part, nest, or egg thereof, included in the terms of the conventions…
That’s pretty comprehensive. That bird nest and the six robins that live in it are protected with the full force of the law until those baby birds are able to fly away on their own.
The truck has actually already been sold; thankfully, the new owners are happy to wait until those baby birds can fly before taking possession of the truck, which will forever have a fantastic origin story as the former federally protected home of a family of birds.
I’m sure the robin parents are very excited for their quadruplets to grow up healthy and happy and be able to take those first tentative flights, and while they may miss their old nest with its great view of that coil spring, I’m sure they’ll find lovely new homes, ideally ones not in the wheel wells of pickup trucks.
On a more cynical note, I wonder if an arrangement with some local robins could help with, say, keeping your car from being repossessed? Slide a local robin a fistful of nightcrawlers in exchange for building a nest in whatever car you’re temporarily underwater in, and boom, you’ve scored yourself a little more, federally-protected time where your car can’t get repo’d!
Maybe those ornithologists are right; we do need more bird content!
Top graphic image: KHOU11/YouTube
Ah, yes. The lawsuit over the Featherly site. How did that lawsuit resolve?
Wasn’t there some big flap about that?
Something about feather bedding, Hu
I think it eventually tied back to the winged emblem on the Bentley.
I had no idea robins were protected, since here they’re just the most common, ordinary bird after sparrows, pigeons, doves and gulls.
Irl when you find the shell of a robin’s egg on the ground, it is the prettiest blue color ever.
This amazes me as well, I am surprised that an American Robin would need to be protected. Here in New England they are everywhere, has to be in the top 3 of birds seen on a daily basis, and we have a lot of bird species around here.
Right, it’s because it’s “all migratory birds.” I never thought of them that way, unlike some cool finches and such that literally appear here for 1-2 days and continue thru.
You think the repoman gives a crap about the Migratory Bird Act? They’ve probably never heard of it.
Even those in higher power don’t give a crap about actual Federal laws and regulations.
Unless those laws and regulations are somehow in their favor, in which case they will beat you senseless with The Book.
True, I forgot to mention the word “inconvenient”.
They love convenient laws, which is obviously true patriotism.
FYI for any crafters out there, the Migratory Bird Act means it’s generally illegal to sell anything that has a wild bird feather on or in it. Yes, even if it’s just a feather you found on the ground somewhere. You probably won’t be prosecuted for this, but it has happened.
The history behind the 1918 law is fascinating. It exists because you may remember people used to love to put exotic feathers in their hats.
But behind that is a tale of ornithologists and environmental people being hunted, threatened, and murdered for trying to protect birds.
Every week, it seems, we get another angry letter (sent via carrier pigeon) from a livid ornithologist. “Why do you never cover any bird-related news?” they demand. “This is avian erasure!” they scream at us in vitriolic voicemails.
Surprised it wasn’t a Tweet
The first line of this article is enough to identify the author. Never change Jason!
This comment hits. First thing I did was check the byline just to know that I was right.
I work on a fairly large corporate campus with a big pond, and one day I noticed a car driving around that had a wrap advertising “goosebusters”, which caught my attention as I didn’t know that was a thing someone could do as a business.
I searched it up, and turns out they use trained border collies to scare geese away, but basically just by going and staring at the geese. A couple weeks later I saw them in action, and sure enough they just had a couple of border collies walking around and staring menacingly at geese until they left lol. I later found out there are multiple companies across the US that use this same method to keep geese away because it doesn’t run a-“fowl” of the migratory bird treaty.
Also, if you’ve ever been to the Currituck sound in the Outer Banks, there’s a neat museum in Corolla (not pronounced like the car, but cur-all-uh) that highlights some of the history of industrial hunting of migratory birds in the area and the destruction it caused before the Migratory Bird Treaty was signed.
From this day forth I am going to be thinking about wildfowl whenever I sing along to Ray Parker Jr.
One less brodozer on the road is okay with me..
About a year ago the lead instructor/owner of my martial arts school asked me to go out and make sure an aging minibus in our parking lot still ran. The bus belongs to a local daycare, but it often stays in our lot because the daycare uses it to bring their kids to us. It hesitated a little at first before starting with a solid WOOMPH. I let it idle for a few minutes, and then went back inside to put the key away. I came back out to grab something from my car when I saw something very odd. There was a cone-shaped pattern of dried grass, feathers, and stunned young birds on the pavement behind the bus. That WOOMPH was the sound of the their nest being shot out of the tailpipe.
The young birds were fledged, so I roughly put their nest back together and set them up in a nearby shrub. Within a few hours I saw the parents hanging around the shrub tending to their smelly offspring. It’s interesting to know that if I had noticed the nest before starting the bus I would have been legally obliged to leave it in tailpipe. Good on this dealership and the buyers for accommodating nature when they probably could have quickly gotten rid of the nest without anyone noticing.
As someone cursed with the given name of Robin, I thought my middle school years had exposed me to every possible joke/insult about my name (examples: “Where’s Batman?”, “When are you flying south for the winter?”, “You don’t look like a girl”, etc…), I guess all I can say is thank you, Torch, for turdus migratorius. Thankfully the middle schoolers I went to school with didn’t know latin.
And yet Magnum PI drove around Hawaii in a Ferrari 308 with the license plate Robin 1, sometimes an Audi with Robin 2 and various GMC Jimmy’s with Robin 3. Nobody is making fun of Tom Selleck and his fabulous stache.
Until the bastard comes to steal your house.
You know, with his Magnum money, Three men and a … franchise, other assorted movies, guest appearances on Friends (sans mustache), 9 Jesse Stone mysteries, and 14 years on Blue Bloods, how much money did they have to throw at him to hawk reverse mortgages?
He just does it for the love of the game.
Lol, I have no idea. I just love to tell people that Tom Selleck is coming to steal their house, even in the seemingly rare instances in which a reverse mortgage seems like a potentially good financial option.
How dare you lump “Mr Baseball” in with “other assorted movies”!
=P
Remember, those weren’t his cars. He was leaching off of Robin Masters.
(In a way, that also kind of fits – I usually go by “Rob”, and way too often it seems like people treat it like a verb or an instruction. Maybe Mr. Masters went by Rob, also.)
The P.I. wasn’t a “Robin”, he was a “Magnum”. There’s a significantly different quality to those names.
I feel your pain. My name is Simon. Simon says is one of my favorites.
So I can’t mess with a robin, but those little suckers are perfectly free to flutter in my face and crap on my feet while I’m curled up in my hammock chair with a good book on a Saturday afternoon? Where’s my protection treaty???
Sooo hypothetically asking for a friend:
If one of those fancy protected robins were to meet its demise with a friend’s windshield at highway speed what would the statute of limitations be for that friend? Would, oh say 25 years be long enough?
You are just not allowed to sell your friend’s car while the feathers were still stuck to the windshield.
That was a different friend, the robin was a turkey and the windshield the grill of a Jeep.
What if your friend’s dog sees three fledgling robins in the yard and decides to eat them (feathery crunchies)?
Robins? What robins?
If it were my truck I would have been glad to wait. Then I would buy my CONRAD vanity plate.
I see what you did there
Bye Bye.
Glad to see that you’re well versed in Bird Law!
Add Charlie Kelly to the Autopian roster of expert consultants.
Olathe Kansas! I’m always reading that name on aircraft instruments–I guess a lot of them are made there?
‘Tis the home of Garmin and several other aviation suppliers. Between Wichita and the greater Kansas City, there’s a lot of aviation manufacturing in Kansas.
Aww, good on that dealership for making sure that everybody’s heard about the bird!
Papa oom mow mow
The bird is the word.
Sadly “turdus” is Latin for “thrush”. No scatological reference despite what it sounds like to us Puritannical colonials.
Even when Torch isn’t trying to do a poop joke one slips out.
badumtish
He blocks in the wheel well all day long
This F 250 won’t be leavin’ anon
All the little birdies in the dealer’s fleet
Love to hear the robin go tweet tweet tweet
Blockin’ robin, tweet tweet tweet
Blockin’ robin tweet tweetly tweet
Go blockin’ robin
‘Cause you’re really gonna block tonight
Every little swallow, every chickadee
And every little bureaucrat in old DC
The wise old owl, the big black crow
Flappin’ their gums singing, go bird, go
Blockin’ robin, tweet tweet tweet
Blockin’ robin’ tweet tweetly tweet
Go blockin’ robin
‘Cause you’re really gonna block tonight
Yeah, yeah
Pretty little turdus on the dealer’s sign
Taught them how to do the block and it was fine
They started going steady and bless my soul
Out popped four eggs in the front wheel cove
Blockin’ robin, tweet tweet tweet
Blockin’ robin’ tweet tweetly tweet
Go blockin’ robin
‘Cause you’re really gonna block tonight
He blocks in the wheel well all day long
Hoppin’ and a-boppin’ and singing his song
All the little birdies say, “I guess that’s that
‘Less the dealer goes out and buys a cat
Blockin’ robin, tweet tweet tweet
Blockin’ robin’ tweet tweetly tweet
Go blockin’ robin
‘Cause you’re really gonna block tonight
Wow.
Can you say, “COTD”?
Are the new owners empty nesters?
Close the comments. This is perfect
I’m glad the new owners are good sports.
At this stage I’m surprised the government hasn’t mandated killing baby birds as a requirement to buy a 3/4 ton truck.
Seriously. I don’t believe for one second that the current federal government would give two shits about this. Hell, if anybody actually complained, RFK would probably show up and eat the whole shebang raw. Cheers to Olathe Ford Lincoln and especially the new owners!
Ha
Junior and birds compete for worms, and he’s bigger, so you’re probably right.
When reached for comment, Secretary Kennedy said “HARGAH BARGLE raw milk AH BARGA HARGAH birds cause autism.”
Nobody told orange guy yet. Stupid rules shouldn’t get in the way of business. /s
I do appreciate that the dealer and purchaser have decided to Live and Let Live
There’s a great museum on the Outer Banks in Corolla (pronounced Cur-all-uh, not like the car) that details the industrial hunting of migratory birds in the Currituck sound and the annihilation of migratory birds it caused. That business was a big reason the Migratory Bird Treaty Act was signed into law, because for the first time humans realized that nature wasn’t just some never-ending resource that would send millions of birds to them every year.
https://northernouterbanks.com/listing/currituck-maritime-museum/
This admin doesn’t understand that “stupid rules” are often designed explicitly to get in the way of business.
Thanks!
No idea where you are or if an Outer Banks vacation would ever be in the cards, but I highly recommend Corolla. It’s as far north as you can get so it’s not really a day trip, but if you rent a house and stay for a week it’s a slower pace and less busy than most of the beach towns and there a lots of cool little places to check out along with fantastic beaches. There’s also access to the 4wd beach where you can go out on the sand, and there are even houses up there where the only access is to drive up the beach.
Also, wild (feral) horses!
The concept of animals going extinct didn’t really exist before the early 19th century. Before that people had found fossils of prehistoric animals, and it was assumed they were just living somewhere else now. Like a farm upstate.
Yes, and with the sideways-exception of when fossils were found in earlier times and assigned as the bones of giants or cyclops or dragons and similar mythical things.
I laugh at the part of Moby Dick when the narrator goes off on a tangent about how humans aren’t hunting whales to extinction; they’re less common because they’re getting smarter.
Gonna start a polymarket on whether or not the truck will be recalled before the babies fledge.
turdus migratorius,
Tell me about it. I have to clean my mailbox almost daily this time of year. Effin hate robins.
This dealer is going to milk all of the PR and news room attention on this. Free advertising.