The Science is Inconclusive

A Counterfactual Testimonial

By the bruised dawn of the third day, every car, rooftop, and byway was caked with the stilton cheese of bird droppings. Every lawn was matted, sewers were clogged. Birds had converged from far and wide, from every continental state, many of them not indigenous here. Finches, warblers, rare merganser ducks and trumpeter swans. Canaries that according to televised reports had gone flapping mad in their cages until their owners had reached in to calm them, inadvertently setting them free. Telephone wires hung low under their weight, trees screamed like cacophonous boom-box speakers. The locals, the first day, had been roundly amused. “This is a rare tweet,” was an oft heard chuckle. But soon even the cats were hunkering under whatever shelter they could find.

Teams of scientists came clamoring across the state: ornithologists, zoologists, botanists, climatologists. Reporters from around the globe grimaced on television, clad in slickers like errant lobstermen, while pallid oysters fell on them like urgent updates from the sky. Snowplows convoyed in from Colorado. Hundreds of volunteers from seventeen states were sent home due to bitter disputes over who should pay to feed and house them. Insurance companies flocked in to shoot commercials.

The prevalent theory had it that the birds had swarmed to New Mexico, tens of millions of them, for its cleanest air and waterways in the nation. But the validity of that number one ranking was quickly challenged by Wyoming, Alaska, Utah, and the former governor of Texas (asserting that Houston’s image had been unfairly smeared by far-left partisan conspirators). This of course meant that the White House had come swaggering into the divide, and while the vice president huddled in his office with unnamed shadows, the president issued a televised assurance that his hand-picked K-Street appointees were working round the clock to draft his Avian Migration Act. The Act spurred a feverish row in Congress, and yet the majority soon threw themselves at the president’s feet, shrinking from public outrage over a Fox News report that cited their pork-barrel interest in leaving our harbors and reservoirs vulnerable to incursions by fanatical eco-terrorists and recently activated Iranian sleeper cells. Smiling as he signed the Act into law, the president added his personal earmark, relegating “The Great New Mexico Flyway Anomaly” to historical footnote, banning its teaching in public schools for its unreasoned support of Darwinism.