Furious Fowls

Why the birds are furious They had a tree. A very good tree — a broad oak on the ridge, six nests in it, and a dawn chorus that had taken four seasons to get right. The pigs had a field. Pigs cannot climb and pigs cannot fly, and what a pig in a field mostly has is a view of the field. This was felt, at some length, over the fence. The birds are heavy sleepers. They have to be: you cannot rehearse a dawn chorus at dawn without going to bed in the afternoon, and by nine in the evening the whole ridge is out cold. So nobody woke up. Not when the sawing started, not when the oak came down in the small hours, and not when three hundred metres of the finest nesting timber on the ridge went over the fence one plank at a time. They woke up on the ground. The pigs had been busy. Fifty structures, from a shed to a proper walled citadel, every last one of them built out of somebody else's tree — and a pig sitting in each one with the smug, settled look of an animal that has finally got a view. One of them waved. The birds held a meeting. The findings were: (a) that this was not on, and (b) that a bird carrying a full winter's grudge cannot actually get much above the fence under its own power, which was awkward, and was not mentioned again. What they had was the last fork of the oak, still standing where the trunk used to be, and the elastic out of the choir conductor's braces. You are not knocking those forts down. You are taking the tree back, one plank at a time, and it is going to land on somebody. (The pigs tell it differently. They say the tree was dead, the birds were loud, and nobody in the history of the field has ever asked a pig what it would like. If you press UP at the menu you can hear their side of it, at which point the slingshot is theirs and the birds are the ones sitting in the buildings looking pleased.)