As regular CFZ-watchers will know, for some time Corinna has been doing a column for Animals & Men and a regular segment on On The Track... particularly about out-of-place birds and rare vagrants. There seem to be more and more bird stories from all over the world hitting the news these days so, to make room for them all - and to give them all equal and worthy coverage - she has set up this new blog to cover all things feathery and Fortean.

Monday 29 April 2013

Return of the bird king —Mehboob Qadir

Musharraf seems to have missed the basic lesson that humility and benevolence are the first steps in public service and not boastfulness and spite

Somewhere in the childhood books one had read the story of the infamous bird king who had brought about untold misery to his subjects just because he could not see beyond his own beak and because he had grown fond of his own plumage. More than that, he was not prepared to listen to sane advice or straight talk as he became too full of himself, and like his plumage, he was overstuffed with the mistaken notion of self-importance, and thus of his self-assigned indispensability for his kingdom of feathers and twigs. What he also failed to realise was that the kingdom he had acquired was not genuinely his and that he became the bird king by chance and collusion, not through due process.

As the story goes, there was a bird kingdom without a king who had been shot out of the skies by a reckless poacher some time ago. Quite disrespectfully, the town taxidermist still had its preserved body placed in his shop window. The bird assembly had been looking for a suitable candidate when one fine morning they spotted a big grey bird with an impressive gaze and regal plumage perched on a branch of a pine tree in the city’s central park. It looked majestic in appearance surveying the panorama in a dignified silence. The bird assembly went into session and elected the great grey bird as their king. 

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