For 
I am a generally happy person. I'm not mad hatter happy and I'm not what drugs does she take cuz I want some happy, I just prefer not to wallow in despair and self-loathing whenever possible. That doesn't mean I never feel sad, angry, ashamed, dumb, dumpy, and so forth. I feel those things plenty. Write about those things plenty, too. Helps me process. Helps me learn.
I didn't used to feel so much. Not that I was incapable. I was just afraid. So I learned to crush feelings and stuff them deep down into the darkest depths where heart attacks and suicides and cancer cells grow. Fortunately I learned to process and feel and heal before my own malpractice killed me, and, happy ending (though the journey hasn't ended yet), most of what I feel on a daily basis is good. Why? Because I process things in the moment and work through them instead of letting them fester.
Birds process their emotions in the moment.
Like, all the time.
Completely.
Without having to stop and wonder what they're feeling and why.
Without having to go to therapy.
I see their emotions transform from playful and happy to content to greedy to angry to scared. I watch them become the aggressor and the aggressee, see triumph and loss, happiness, sadness, satisfaction, and outright sulking. A day in the life of a bird has such an immense variety of extremes that for a minute I wondered how it was that they weren't just a mess of post traumatic stress and depression and all those other disorders that come with living such intense lives.
I'm not a biologist or an ornithologist, nor am I a psychologist. And although I spend a great deal of time observing birds and learning from and about them, I have never in this life experienced what it is like to actually be one of these amazing flying smarty-pants. (Smarty-pantses?) I do, however, have thoughts on why there are no mental institutions filled with freaked-out wildlife.
And it's not just because birds don't have the funds to build them.
Most of the humans I know have been taught from a very young age to put a cap on their emotions. As kids we might be permitted for a few years to run around having a screaming good time at the playground, or an absolute pants-shitting meltdown at the sight of a clown, but as we mature into relatively functional members of society we are expected to settle down considerably. I'm not sure why, but part of this means we impose upon ourselves restrictions on our own deeply internal, deeply personalized reactions to stimuli. We adhere to those ideas as though there were some highway patrol vehicle hiding somewhere inside us just waiting to turn on the lights and pull us over for feeling too much.
When strong emotions come up, we try to control them, and, sometimes, deny them.
I don't think the birds have any notion of what it's like to control an emotion. Why would they? They may have the common sense that comes with age to control how they act on these emotions, but there is no stifling what happens within. They have no shame around feelings. No bird tells another bird not to feel something. A herring gull, for example, definitely wants his crow competitor to have the fullest experience of fear when he charges her, lest she think stealing his food is a walk in the park.
And the crow isn't going to internalize that fear, call herself a chicken for being afraid, and go and develop a complex of shame and hatred that gets triggered every time she sees a seabird as a result of never fully processing her emotions. She'll probably just think, wow that was fucking scary, then sit back and watch how other crows do it, if they do it, to see if she can have another go at getting a free lunch without getting mauled by some big bulky bird bully.
⬆️Entry photo.⬆️
I could go on about this more, about how my own personal growth and all my accomplishments I've made are absolutely inconsequential to wild birds (lucky bastards), but that would run the risk of me worrying about being perceived as boring or a pompous know-it-all and having to work through all the pesky emotions around that. Plus I'm tired and I wanna go to bed.
I will simply close with this "owl," who is really an asshole.
Thanks for reading.
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