Imaginary Friends

I have suspected for several years now that chickens may be among the least intelligent organisms in creation, below paramecia and perhaps just above chalk dust. (Is chalk dust an organism?) Imagine my surprise when we went to the bird show at Hogle Zoo, and they had a "trained" chicken. I put that word in quotes because its routine wasn't terribly impressive. The show consisted mostly of parrots answering questions and various large raptors flying over the audience low enough to knock the top hats off the people wearing them—which was no one, fortunately. The chicken's trick was walking from one side of the stage to the other at apparently random times during the show. For the highlight of the performance, it "danced." I put that word in quotes because, well, it didn't exactly do the chicken dance, if you know what I mean. Basically, it just scratched around in the dirt. Pretty much like chickens normally do, except it did it at a certain time. Then t...

Outside the City of Smith, in the valley of buried furs, there's a small fiefdom known as Thistle Park. This domain is so named because of an abundance of birds, mostly the little black kind that make a shrill, annoying, single-note call and do such endearing things as building nests, hatching eggs, and letting their little ones fall to their deaths, all inside the exhaust vents of furnaces, thereby rendering said furnaces inoperable and causing their owners to have to saw the pipes in half to flush the rotted corpses of baby birds out into a bucket. Oh, my mistake. It's named for the chest-high thistles festooning the grounds. In the eastern estate of Thistle Park, where the thistles grow thickest and tallest, is a quaint, old Butler grain silo twenty feet across and about eight feet high at the wall. No grain has laden this structure for many years, and a small flock of odious birds have taken up residence within. They aren't the little black kind that make a shrill, anno...