Fauna: Birds

[NetSysFire]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

We need more and more realistic birds.

Solution you would like.

• [ ] Lots of birbs to consider! https://www.mass.gov/doc/bird-list/download
• [ ] Turkeys (https://www.mass.gov/info-details/prevent-conflicts-with-turkeys) and Canada geese (https://www.mass.gov/info-details/learn-about-canada-geese) could be a potential mutant target.
• [ ] Pigeons should also be more prevalent in cities. They are the rats of the sky. Also good mutant target.

Describe alternatives you have considered.

No response

Additional context

More to be suggested. This is mainly to write down steps.

[fairyarmadillo]

Scavenger birds are a really prevalent part of zombie media but ours kind of suck. I think their main problem currently is that they don't spawn in cities. We should probably have lots of crows hanging out on rooftops at the very least, that way when they start evolving they can hassle the player.

Ravens prefer to live in wilder areas. I'm not sure exactly how they're distributed in NE but the general rule is that crows live in forests and towns and ravens live in less hospitable places.

New England also has turkey vultures. Given that they're eating zombies, these guys could become pretty nasty.

I think monster pigeons is a little too silly. Pigeons are herbivores and totally unthreatening. They'd just wind up as food for everything else imo.

[Karol1223]

I feel like the problem with simulating city birds boils down to performance. If we tried to do even remotely realistic amount of city birds the game would slow down to a crawl. There needs to be some middle ground that can be found, though.

[fairyarmadillo]

Even a handful of crows in a town would feel a lot better than none, and we can explain their low numbers with predation and die-off due to maladaptive mutation.

Later in the game, when they've grown to the size of dogs and lost the ability to fly, the reason there are so few of them should be self evident.

[ADekema]

I always theorised that after the cataclysm in cities pigeons would be replaced by vultures. The main reason being that vulture could possibly eat zombies (they already eat the nastiest stuff you can imagine) and would after a while be just as willing to take a peck out of a walking corpse as out of a still one. This would probably have the side effect of rampant mutation but it wouldn´t get to out of hand given that natural selection will weed out anything too mutated.

Even if they don´t eat zombies there is still the fact that there would be a steady steam of edible corpses on the edge of the city that vultures could eat. Nothing would bother them given that they are too small for zombies to care and the zombies also keep anything bigger away.

[fairyarmadillo]

There simply aren't that many vultures in the United States. We do have a lot of crows, however.