When I was little I loved the Pocahontas movie, and I used to sing in my backyard the colors of the wind song. However, whenever I did, If I heard a bird make a noise or the wind blow, I thought that I was being spoken to. I would get all excited and think the birds were actually trying to communicate with me. "Mommy, the birds are speaking to me!!"

Lauren

My grandparents on both sides grew up on farms and moved to the suburbs as adults, therefore there was always this misguided farm wisdom in the city. One of my Grandfathers used to say that "Turkeys are so stupid that if it was raining they would drown." (by looking up into the sky and filling their mouth and nostrils with rain.) As a college freshman moving to Northern Wisconsin (major farms of all types) I thought that the Ginsing fields (which are covered entirely using posts and enormous tarps) were turkey shelters.

Angela

For some reason, my sister's friend used to think that birds didn't really exist, and that someone had just made them up to trick her or something......wierd

Hannah's friend's sister (don't ask)

we had a neighbor down the street and they had been talking about how they had a birds nest in one of their porch plants.
one day i went there and peeked inside the pot, amazed at seeing real baby bird eggs infront of me.
i secretly stole one of them and took it hoom so i could "make it hatch".
i put it in the microwave, because i thought that would make the baby be born faster and then i could raise it.
needless to say, my mother was not happy with the exploded yolk all over the inside of the microwave!

stephanie

At the school I first attended, there was an enormous privet hedge with several big gaps in it, presumably where the branches hadn't been able to grow or where the hedge had been damaged by a football.

At the age of about five or six, I discovered one of these gaps. Sticking my head inside, I saw little piles of grass (cuttings that had fallen off the lawnmower?), lots of twigs, and some vaguely cup-shaped leaves filled with rainwater.

My conclusion?

IT WAS A HOTEL FOR BIRDS.

It all seemed very simple. The leaf "cups" were for the birds to drink from. The twigs and grass were their "beds" (nests), but they'd got horribly messed up, which was why there weren't any birds staying there now.

I spent the next couple of months tidying up the "hotel", making neat little nests to lodge amongst the branches. When the birds still didn't come, I wasn't discouraged-- I figured they'd go to hotels when everyone else did, that is, in the school holidays!

silverstar1809

When I was somewhat younger than now, I used to believe that waterfowl (swans, geese and ducks) tucked their legs into their bodies when they swam. Now I know that they use their feet as paddles...

Pesky

My babysitter told me the Reason people would "watch you like a hawk" was because hawks loved the taste of toddler meat.. and would swoop down when hungry and carry you off..

Josh

I, a few years ago, saw birds bouncing off each other for the first time. I was in my mid teens, and i stood up, i yelled at dad, and i said "hey dad! look! those birds are fighting! look at them fight! i wonder what happened!"
and he said to me "cass, they're having sex."
and i said "oh. nevermind."

cassie

i used to believe that if you stuck your hand out the window in a car the birds would think your fingers were worms and bite them off. so whenever i stuck my hand out the window i'd always put my fingers in a fist so they the birds wouldnt eat them!

Brie

When I was around 7 or 8, we moved to a house that had chickens, roosters, horses and a few ducks. My mom told me that the way eggs turn into baby chickens is that the rooster fertilizes the eggs. (I already knew how OTHER animals with "live births" got pregnant. I never really thought much of it, but I took this to mean that the chicken lays the eggs, and then the rooster sits on them and does the deed.

I skipped grades in school, and my IQ is QUITE high (not as high as it was when I was a kid, though!) Yet I didn't actually "find out" how baby chickens get "into the egg" until I was a young adult...

Lisa

When I was around 5 years of age I used to believe that the birds would nest in my garden if I made their nests for them. I spent many a happy hour gathering clay pots and filling them with freshly gathered moss twigs and grass and placing them about my garden, on ground level, then darting back into the house to look out of the kitchen window to see how grateful they would be.

Avonmouth Wendy

When I was 4, I had a bad dream that big mean owls stole my pretzels and ate them. So whenever I went camping and was eating, I would hunch over my food to make sure the owls didn't steal my food.

Amy

I used to think that everytime a chicken took a crap it laid an egg. I was so nieve.

Bob.

I used to believe that budgies lived for hundreds of years, as I was told the one in the house was the same as my greatgrandmother had had. If it died, they just bought one exactly the same, and gave it the same name!

Ruth

One of my friends told me that when she was little she asked her mother where chicks came from. Her mother told her that the cockerel 'saw' to the chicken's egg and a chick was the result.

She told me that for years she had envisaged a cockerel staring intently at a fully formed egg until a baby chick hatched.

Katie Fox

when i was little, my parents used to take me to the park and tell me that there were very pretty baby pink and yellow birds there and that if i ran after them really quickly, i could bring them home with me.

i spent countless times running from tree to tree trying to 'catch' these birds. it was only when i got older that i realized it was my parents' way of getting me to exercise cos i was a really lazy kid. come to think abt it, i never actually seen these colored birds before either.

Jean

I used to believe that sprinkling pepper on a bird's tail would somehow make it passive and it'd belong to you...which stemmed from my misinterpretation of my father's comment that if you could get close enough to a bird to put pepper on its tail, you might as well catch it!

Kirryn

A belief that many people share, I'm sure - if you find a baby bird on the ground, out of its nest..."Don't pick it up!" they tell you. The mother bird will smell your scent on the baby and will refuse to care for it.

I learned in college this is not true: most birds don't have a sense of smell at all, so no mother bird will reject her baby because it smells like a human. "Officials" just don't want people picking up baby birds!

Anon

Half my life I used to believe that humming birds didn't have feet. I felt really sorry for them, because I thought they were doomed to spend their entire lives hovering. Then one time I saw a humming bird by our feeder I started crying because I had seen birds LAND on it. My mom came in saw me crying and told me the truth.

Stormy age 13

I believed they put heated coils in lakes for the ducks to swim in the wintertime.

Anon