Birds Thou Never Wert

"What's the name of this grim fowl?" I asked.

"Well, part of his name, for all the clatter he makes, might be cacophonous," Victor said. "In fact, he might be referred to as the cacophonous, as in 'Was that a cacophonous I heard over t'other side of the junkyard?' "

"A grackle?" I asked.

"Oh, no, no, no," said Victor. "He's a parasite, a cowbird. He's huge, of course, for a cowbird, so that would make him the giant cacophonous cowbird. And, unfortunately, he's abundant and widespread, so that makes him the common giant cacophonous cowbird."

"What about his habits?" I asked.

Rowlett felt it should be constantly in motion. "He leaps up and down a lot. Perhaps they should make a sound when they hop, like a man lifting up a barbell: ugh, ugh, ugh! That's how those ostrich thighs have evolved. A big hopper. He hops up to look over things—tall grass or hedges—the way a rabbit does. You're on one side of the hedge and all of a sudden the cacophonous materializes on the other, a clump of a thing at the top of its hop, staring straight at you."

"The eye. That's an important feature," I mentioned. I went on to suggest that the strange yellowish button eye of the flamingo had always struck me as peculiarly alarming in its lifelessness and might be a good candidate. "It's an awfully dead eye," I said.

John and Victor nodded. I felt smug and contented to have made a small contribution to the bird. I didn't tell them that my field observations were made not from the wild but from a picnic in the infield of Hialeah Park. A flamingo had come over and taken a long look at a grape on my paper plate.

Rowlett was saying that he thought one side of the cacophonous' head could have an eye stripe, and the other side could have an eye-ring.

Victor demurred. He shook his head and said he would rather like to see a bird with odd demarcations of that sort: That made the cacophonous too interesting.