May

The faculty at the Proudmoore University of Ornithology was excited about the 2008 class of doctoral candidates. The students had demonstrated mastery of bird paleonthology early on and even excelled in obscure fields like generating computer models to predict the behavioral patterns of large flying beasts. The talents of students in the class were widely varied, with skills ranging from attracting dozens of angry bird at one time, to hacking at large chickens from behind to avoid the chickens’ parrying, to antidoting certain deadly bird epidemics to name a few.

On top of it all, the graduating class was led unofficially by a student with no legal name — whose driver’s license and student id simply said “Bird Man.” This character of a character called his classmates into a meeting one day and wanted to discuss obtaining a great gift for their professors, for whom they held the highest esteem. They brainstormed what they could do, and ultimately it was decided that they would take a long field trip into deep into Sunwell Plateau to debone a large rare bird creature called a Felmyst and present the full skeleton to the faculty.

This was no easy task, for their beboning equipment was lacking of what was required. Luckily, there were hundreds of little packs of bird creatures along the way to Felmyst where our soon to be commencement participants would spent hours and days and weeks upgrading their deboning gear. On the day they deemed themselves ready and worthy, they defeated Felmyst after many tries, since Felmyst was no spring chicken. The students packed each bone carefully, paleonthologically, and ornithologically. They presented the reconstructed skeleton to the faculty, and there was great rejoicing all around.

It took the efforts of the class outcast to ruin it call, this character nicknamed “Poop Man.” “Poop man” had not gotten to participate in his classmates’ joint venture and now spent many hours trying to undermine the gift. He found a fatal flaw in the preciousness of the specimen — that it was simply and completely just an oversized turkey — not some new rare, uncaptured bird. He announced this fact with great pleasure at commencement upon receiving his diploma, becoming the hero of class outcasts everywhere. Soon after that, however, “Poop man” now aka “Turkey Man” went mad (like the insane kind) and spent the rest of his career publishing papers purporting different species of canine and feline to be birds instead. He was mocked even by other class outcasts for the rest of his days.

Moral of the Story: Don’t be the “Poop Man” or the “Turkey Man” of your group, or you’ll invariably go taxonomically insane.

All future story ideas can be mailed to: kharmanderwontreadyouremail@gmail.com