Birds have never accepted humans as equals. They have been monitoring our progress over the centuries with diligence. Their north-south seasonal flights are not for feeding and breeding as we assume, but for surveillance and research. Now their leaders have concluded that we’re a vicious race with a hidden agenda. We don’t know yet their full intentions, but the recent bird flue outbreak may give you an idea.
Dikran Djamillian is a distinguished linguist who teaches ancient Assyrian and Aramaic at Aleppo University and has owned homing pigeons since childhood. When I first started researching the big bird conspiracy just over a decade ago, I asked him to help me with bird communication. Just the communication not the language, I said, for I was not sure birds have a language in the same way we do. The results were astounding.
Birds collect and store information using a sign language conveyed in the shape of straw bundles. Straws are twisted with care to convey hundreds of bird letters and zillions of bird words and infinite arithmetic formulas. This is why birds spend so much time selecting the right straws for their mats. Each mat is a bird dictionary. Each nest conveys written knowledge from one generation to another. Chicks stay in the nest for weeks to learn the language, and those who don’t do their homework are forced to study late into the night. Once they master the art of reading and writing by straws, the young are allowed to leave the nest and join other colonies.
“It’s a hierarchical system, very rigorous, and parents are very active and competitive about the education of their kids, Djamillian recently told specialists at the Institute of Advanced Bird Studies in New Zealand. His research is just beginning to reveal the extent of the intelligence of our feathered opponents.
Think of that. We’ve been picking fights with fellow humans, whereas we should have been looking up to heaven, where the real threat was. Human beings are often racist, uptight and badly dressed. You may hate them all you want, but think again. Those who blow smoke in your face or ban smoking; those who call you at 6:30 a.m. and ask for Aunt Sherine; and those who drop leaflets in your taxi as you’re trying to have a meaningful conversation with your born-again driver. These are not the enemy.
Humans may want to annihilate the village next door or condemn the turn-of-the-century villa around the corner, but these are just details. Human villains fight against other tribes, nations and creeds. But they never try to eliminate the entire human race. And they always come up with an explanation. “This nation wants the land of our forefathers. This building wasn’t economically viable. This god is an imposter. There is always an explanation, perhaps unconvincing, but that’s more than the birds are offering. In the ultimate bird attack, no one will survive. The birds will keep coming back, with all types of debilitating diseases, until we’re all dead and buried. That, I suspect, is their plan.
To this day, it beguiles me that birds and humans can’t co-exist. We can both turn against the termites, or the jelly fish I guess. But I don’t see it happening, not with the current leaders of the fowl community in power. I have talked to a few, and all they did was stare at me askance, blink and fly away. What exactly do they want? Perhaps they want an apology for the atrocities we’ve committed against domestic fowl. Perhaps they want compensation. Perhaps they want us to quit flying. I don’t know.
I have been sending messages to the bird community, offering the human point of view. “We let you fly in our open skies, gather around our fountains, perch upon our places of worship, and you keep defecating on our shoulders. What exactly do you want? We eat domestic fowl, grilled and fried with ketchup sauce, but we can stop. We’ll eat worms if you want us to. But do you really want us to do that? Are there enough worms to go around?
These messages have been translated into bird languages. They’ve been written in rolled straw and posted in strategic spots. It was an effort that took Djamillian and his team months of work. They had to pick the right straws and soften them with saliva. They had to maintain the right humidity and test every strand of fiber for climatic changes. Last week, two or three bird leaders were seen examining messages left on the roof of the Notre Dame Cathedral. I am hoping they’ll come back with an answer, but you never know. Somewhere up in heaven, our future is being decided.
