birds

I used to believe nugget-laying chickens existed. Unlike chicken breast and chicken leg a nugget doesn’t actually look like a body part so I never realized what it really was

Chicken nuggets

That our car roof was a roosting place for incredibly noisy and thus large birds. It wasn't until I was six that I noticed that these bird landings corresponded exactly with my Dads arm being out of the car window.

Chris

There were chickens which had been specially bred to have 6 legs (hence more drumsticks)...the problem was, nobody could catch them.

cliff

From the time I was a child, I believed penguins were man-sized. All the pictures I ever saw of them they were standing on ice, with nothing to reference their size. I am 57 and it wasn't until a few years ago that I learned differently.

Joan, in Australia now

When I was small (6 or 7 I believe), my mother bought me an easter chick at the market. An easter chick is a live baby chicken that had been dyed in one of several pastel colors and sold in the days leading up to easter (I grew up in the country in Puerto Rico).

Anyhow, the chicken was my only pet when I was growing up. I grew extremely attached to the chicken and proudly ate the egg she laid every night for breakfast the next day. I had her for a long time in the backyard until one day she ran away!

It was not until I was 30 (a couple of years ago) that it occured to me that the chicken soup we had that same day may not have come from the supermarket!

Javier

My Nana once caught my cousin (who was about 3-4 years old at the time), planting feathers in a row in the garden. When she asked Jason what he was doing he replied, "planting feathers so birds will grow Nana!"

Helen

My dad told me that the reason Birds didn't get electrocuted on overhead wire was they had rubber feet!!

Derricki

When I was a kid, I thought sparrows turned into bats at night which I thought explained why there aren't daytime bats nor nighttime sparrows.

J.Ar

I come from a southern family and there are a lot of sayings that i took very literally as a child. When my grandfather would call me out of the rain he would say that I was oigng to drown like a turkey. He claimed that a turkey would drown in the rain if turkey farmers didn't bring them in because they were so dumb that they would look up to see what was hitting them in the head. I believed this up until I was in college! I was stating this rare fact that i had to a firend (I found out it was rare because no one I had ever told had already known it) when my friend said "Well, there are wild turkeys aren't there?" and it shattered my belief.

Molly Sue

when i was little, my dad was driving me somewhere. along the way, i noticed alot of birds were jumping out infront of our car and flying away. I asked my dad why birds did this, and his response was that it was a game that all birds play, sort of like the game 'chicken'. if the bird made it across the street, it won. if it got hit, the bird lost the game, and died. i'm 19 now, and i still don;'t really know why birds fly infront of cars, but whenever they do, I always congradulate them.

Heather

When I was five, I asked my Nan why birds jumped and people walked (I know, nosey child) and she told me that if birds walked (or their legs moved independantly of one another) their brains would explode. I believed that until a year ago. I'm 25.

Abi

Having no understanding of relative weight and lift, as a little kid I was convinced that if you could snag a bird in something like a bag and hold on to it, you'd be lifted along with it when it tried to fly upward. Fortunately, I never had occasion to test this.

Anon

About six years ago I went with my family to Sea World in Orlando. We had fun walking around and whatnot. Then we went to the penguin exhibit and I saw all the little birds scurrying around and exclaimed "Look at all the baby penguins! Aren't they cute?"

My husband and son began laughing at me.

I learned that day that penguins do not, in fact, grow to be as large as people. I was 52 years old.

Mary

I used to believe that if you left any of your toys laying on the ground at night then a big bird-like monster would come and gobble them all up. It really hit me when one of my Barbie shoes went missing one night.

Kelsey

Whenever I see a helium balloon in the sky, I smile because I remember losing one when I was about three and crying and my mother calming me down by telling me that the birds would play with it until it popped. I'm 31 and still like to comfort kids with that idea when they lose a balloon.

queeneve

Whenever I asked my mom how she knew I'd done somthing bad, she would say "oh a little bird told me". I believed that and was always on my best behavior whenever a bird was around.

Nancy

I used to think that ducks had four legs and that they tucked them under their body when they were out of the water because they didn't like the way they looked and didn't want humans to make fun of them.

Anon

My mother didn't want me picking up bird feathers in the yard, so she told me that they were covered in tiny little flesh-eating bugs.
Whenever me and my sister found a feather, we'd start screaming for somebody to come and take care of it, so the bugs wouldn't get us.

Ari

When I was smaller, about 5 or 6, I used to think that swans were ducks that had their neck streched by vandals late at night!!

Aoidhan

I loved to mix all of my food together as a kid at dinner time - I felt it was more efficient or something.

So, I thought it would be best for our parakeets as well. So I filled their clear plastic, sealed food container with birdseed, gravel and water. (Normally they would need three "dishes" for all of these - when with my system they only needed ONE!)

I came by their cage a couple days later, wondering why they never ate from the plastic feeder anymore....and I saw that grass had sprouted up in the plastic dome.

I felt awful about it...now it just makes me laugh.

Feffer