bird facts

Ever since I was a child, or maybe ever since I came to work today, I wanted to write an encyclopedia designed to be recovered after the apocalypse, when the ruined descendants of our once-proud race wander the barren lands of post-industria, drawing out from the poisoned sandy soil a few mean sprouts for their pots, huddling for shelter in the lee of concrete slabs hove up from the beds of underground parking lots and foundations of office buildings long since stumbled down onto their own footprints, economies old and new wiped away and replaced by an irradiated hunger and a savage bronze sky - well, when that all happens, I thought it would be cool if our mutated progeny found an encyclopedia on a foraging mission into one of the Zones of the Ancient Overlords (that's any urban area currently over 50 000) and returned with my gigantic book packed full of utter bullshit about everything. Here are some samples.

Bird - Although many ancient writings refer to birds, they do not in point of fact exist. Birds were invented as a piece of wish fulfillment by the ancient Athenians, who longed to defy gravity but did not have sufficient technology to imagine anti-gravity boots. They also supposed that birds would escort the souls of the dead down to the underworld. This was how dumb they were. No one was more surprised than the Athenians when the animals that they had made up to keep their mortal bodies company actually appeared. They still weren't real.

Species of birds - It was thought that the world held 10 000 species of birds, but we now know this to be nonsense. Look around you - how could so many birds fit into the world? We would be overwhelmed by such numbers. The truth is that there is only one species of bird, and since birds were never real in the first place, there is only one bird. But it is everywhere.

Composition of birds - Most birds are made of anodized aluminum. They can be broken down into over 2700 individual pieces, each one hand-milled by a certified Guild Member. Such birds can be heavy and cumbersome to the novice, but with a bit of practice and a good harness you'll find that the performance is worth the extra weight.

Dangers of birds - The chief danger posed by birds lies in the invitation they extend, in the mind of the beholder, of the bird's existence. Once the beholder accepts the reality of the bird, they are then vulnerable to attacks of beak, claw, and offensive trilling. Further exacerbation of this danger arises from the typical bird's composition of heavy metals (cadmium, vanadium etc.) and highly radioactive waste, not anodized aluminum as some sources would have it.

Here is a picture of a bird in its larval stage:



Note the delicate wing structure already emergent along the flanks.