Spearow, Fearow
Oh Spearow. The asshole bird. This is the one that swoops you and you didn’t even get close to its nest or anything. If you watched the anime, you remember a horde of these almost killed Ash and Pikachu. It is apparently also loud as all hell, making obnoxious cawing you can hear from half a mile away. I can respect that. I imagine there’s a lot of tense standoffs between a tree full of Spearow and stone-throwing annoyed neighbors.
I liked Spearow as the alternative to Pidgey. I didn’t even really prefer one design over the other. In my kid brain it just always packed a bit more of a punch, and since quick, strong hits are all you need for single player Pokemon, Spearow was always the superior choice.
But FEAROW… now Fearow was a cool design. I still am not sure what exactly it’s supposed to be? Like a chicken/turkey/vulture/stork/dinosaur bird? It’s intimidating as all hell. Probably the scariest avian flying type pokemon besides the legendary birds and like Corviknight. It can hunt prey on both land and in water, and eats EVERYTHING. It’s apparently been around for a long time and can be found on ancient murals - something I wish there was more attention put on. As you’ll see, I LOVE my ancient ruin pokemon, and more Fearow representation would be sick!
Fearow was one of my top favorite pokemon for a while during the first two gens, and still holds a special place in my heart. It’s like Raticate where I love how mean it looks, but it had a bit more survivability on my team since Golbat (my personal favorite flying type in early gens) couldn’t learn the Fly HM - I do NOT miss those - and Dodrio (the only other Fly competitor in my mind) didn’t show up til late game. I still really like it so high marks for this ancient bird monster.
One random thing I noticed - Spearow/Fearow are the first Gen 1 pokemon so far that have not gotten any sort of gimmick update like a regional variant or a Mega evolution. I know Gen 1 gets a sort of unfair advantage to these sorta boosts, but it would be nice to see these rage birds regain some relevance again.