After my first plan to obtain a wild bird to split its
tongue and teach it how to talk was cut short by a raging alcoholic
that wrung its neck I devised a new plan. I was going to take a idea
I had seen on a cartoon and take a stick and a box and put some bird
feed under it and then when a bird walked under the box I would pull
out the stick. Like a pro. It quickly was apparent that I was
fruitlessly trying to mimic engineering used mainly for comic effect
with little real world success. Every time I pulled the string the
birds would fly away effortlessly in the second it took the stick to
fly free and the box to start to drop. Overcoming problems the way I
do, I decided to dig a hole and use a slab of cement for my dead fall
and it would drop so fast the bird could not escape. The careful
reader would have spotted that the term typically used to describe
this type of trap had 'dead' right in the name. That simple
observation eluded me and I waited for my first customer who would be
caught and become my best friend who could talk and preform awesome
parlor tricks. The birds came to eat and I sprung the trap and that
'dead' part of dead fall proved to be prophetic in the least
surprising turn of events in history. So I was there with a crushed
bird crying a little when my mom came out and decided that I wasn't
feeling badly enough and it would be a good time to take me down
another peg. She told me it was evil to kill animals for fun, as if
it had been my intention to kill the bird. I told her I was trying to
catch and train it and that I had no intention of killing it but she
didn't care. She even threatened to make me eat it so it didn't go to
waste. I decided that all was not lost and told her I could get some
flesh beetles and skeletonize it and that way I could build a
skeleton display so the bird didn't die in vain. That made her think
I was some sort of psychopath mass murderer in training and she
emphatically forbade me from desecrating the body of the poor fallen
bird. She made me bury it and never trap birds again. I didn't
respect her wishes and I actually caught a bird the next day but wild
birds are not really good at being caged and it beat itself to death
against the walls of my cage. That broke my heart and then I stopped.
