Over the break between semesters, back at home with the parental units, whose COVID-19 paranoia kept me confined to my bedroom for weeks on end (they left me trays of food outside the door), I had nothing to do but surf the interweb; it was there, in the realm of inconvenient truths, I learned that Birds Aren’t Real.  You may think me the victim of some conspiracy theory like the Moon Landing hoax, the Birther Movement, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, etc., but this one is FACT!  It is REAL!–as real as the fact that global warming is a myth created by China to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, and that Jewish Space Lasers started the fires in California and Boulder County.

For those of you who don’t want to follow the link, here’s the TRUTH in a nutshell.  Between 1959 and 1971, the United States government systematically exterminated all birds in the country and replaced them with drones to spy on American citizens.  Do you ever wonder why the birds that sit on power lines don’t get fried?  It’s because the drones use electrical wires to recharge themselves.  I asked my grandfather about this, when we took our one trip out of the house, to see him at the memory care facility on Christmas Day, and he told me that, before the 1960s, birds avoided power lines like the plague. 

I know that, among the readers of Earth Muffins, there will be a handful of Birdicide deniers but consider for a moment that the poultry you eat (yes, there are still some real birds out there)—chickens, turkeys, ducks, Cornish game hens—have never been known for their aeronautical skills.  And, the most famous living bird of all, LiMu Emu, is flightless (although he can run fast, reaching speeds of 30 mph).  If you doubt my word, find a dead bird in the wild and dissect it; inside you’ll find not blood and guts but electronic devices and a mass of wiring.  Trust me, I did this dozens of times as a kid and sold enough copper wire to buy an iPad.

Do you wonder why, when you’re surfing the web, you find pop-ups that relate to your most recent searches?  The next time that happens, turn around quickly and you’ll find a bird perched on the windowsill, watching your every keystroke.  Crimes are solved nowadays not only by DNA evidence but by videos that our “feathered friends” have taken from on high.  There is no escape.  All our moves are being monitored by drones.  Even Q understands the threat, exhorting his followers to “shoot down the spies that fly overhead.” 

Recently, Peter McIndoe, the founder of the Birds Aren’t Real movement, supposedly admitted to a reporter from The New York Times that the theory is made up, an attempt to satirize other conspiracy theories; but that’s like saying that the articles you find in Earth Muffins are “fake news,” and you know that isn’t true!