It’s ‘Draw a Bird Day,’ You Say? That’s a Thing? Will Monster Hunter’s Huge Fang-y Dragon-Birds, Cuccos and Chocobos Make This Not Suck?

Yes indeed, gentlemen. We had no knowledge of this obscure event until today (thanks, internet!), but April 8 is Draw a Bird Day. You may think that this sounds like the most effeminate item on the calendar besides Y'know, Let's Have In-depth Discussions About Commitment and Our Feelings and Shit While Watching Lifetime TV Day.

You may be the wrongest wrong that was ever wrong there.

For the uninitiated (which is, presumably, every bastard) Draw a Bird Day originated in the latter stages of World War Two. Seven-year-old Dorie Cooper, visiting her grievously-injured uncle in a hospital in Merry Old England, asked him to draw her a bird. "After seeing her uncle's bird picture, Dorie laughed out loud and proclaimed that he was not a very good artist, but that she would hang the picture in her room nonetheless. Her uncle's spirits were lifted by his niece's complete honesty and acceptance. Several other wounded soldiers also had their day brightened by the event and every time Dorie came to visit thereafter, they held drawing contests to see who could produce the best bird pictures. Within several months, the entire ward's walls were decorated by bird drawings." (-dabday)

Image by Deviantartist Nyaasu

Dorie was hit by a car and killed at the age of ten, and her funeral was punctuated with gifts of the pictures from friends, family and residents of the hospital. April 8 was her birthday, and marks this annual event "to express joy in the very simplest of things in life and as a way to help soldiers everywhere forget war and suffering even if only for a short time."

Which sounds like an admirable cause to us. We've even curtailed the piss-takery and snark in this article, in honor of this slightly-peculiar-yet-heartwarming-for-even-the-crustiest-of-Ebeneezer-Scrooge-esque-hearts occasion. But how, you demand to know, can the gaming gentlemen of Egotastic! celebrate? With these deftly-drawn images of the medium's most badass renegade avians from the depths of Lucifer's anus, that's how. On this page, we see cuccos (The Legend of Zelda's pixie-boy groin and delicate face pecking mofos), chocobos (the beloved simpleton steeds of Final Fantasy fame) and the dastardly Qurupeco from Monster Hunter.

Because the latter is presumably eight feet tall or so, has beak-fangs and the capacity to light your ass ON ACTUAL FIRE. When it isn't summoning its close friend/possible homosexual lover Deviljho (a immense cross between Tyrannosaurus Rex and... a pickle, if you can conceive of such an abomination) to savagely beat on you and/or wipe its feet with your face. All of which is, the last time we checked, the very definition of awesome, mantastic bird-ness.