Is it my imagination that we always seems so surprised that animals could be quite similar to us in many ways?

Again, from McClatchy:

• Another new fact: Birds, like people, have accents

  Humans aren't the only creatures whose regional drawls and twangs give them away. The same thing goes for songbirds. A scientist at Duke University has found that birds, just like humans, learn their songs from one another and "talk" like the birds they grow up with.

Whether one believes in evolution or that God created the world in six of our current calendar days and then rested on the seventh day, it's difficult to have all that much respect or admiration for an animal, or a creation, that fouls its own nest so thoroughly. That's us, not the birds I'm referring to!