This post is for the…oh, you know—read it and see…

Hello, bird lovers, wherever you are…I hope your troubles are few.

     But enough of the Rogers and Hammerstein parodies. If you’ve been following the goings-on in this corner of the World Wide Web (and if you have been following them, hurry up and catch them, before they get away from you), you’ll know that folks here in Funsville take a special interest in the discovery of new species of fauna. (The evidence can be found here and here—go ahead and click—we’ll be right here, waiting for you to come back.)

     We in Funsville take a justifiable, yet still somehow excessive, degree of pride in our ability to identify and catalogue the arkload of previously undiscovered forms of animalia which reside in our hometown and environs. It must be something in the water. Or maybe people in Funsville just see things differently. Come to think of it, that’s probably what it is—the nearest optometrist is fifty miles from here.

     The point is that we take this stuff seriously, to the brink of sheer and utter hubris. When we all heard through the zoological grapevine that a new species of owl had been discovered in Oman, we said “so what?”

     That’s exactly what we said, since that’s the name of the owl that was discovered in Funsville a few years back.

     The So What Owl is a distant relative of the saw-whet owl, but one not known for showing up at family reunions or sending thank-you notes for Christmas presents. This wonder of the avian world possesses the unique ability to do note-for-note reproductions of the trumpet solos from Miles Davis records. The most familiar portion of its repertoire of calls leans heavily on selections from the album Kind of Blue—although during the mating season one or two of the more haunting ballads from Sketches of Spain come into prominence.

 

     For years, talk of the So What Owl consisted of nothing more than legends, apocrypha, urban myths, and/or incoherent drunken pick-up lines, all mostly heard at closing time. After considerable bickering and dickering (also mostly at closing time), the new species was finally confirmed by the Funsville chapter of the Autobahn Society (this is not a typo—the organization was founded by a philanthropist who suffered grievous remorse after running over a covey of quail while vacationing in Germany).

    The discovery of the So What Owl has opened the door to legitimate, semi-legitimate, and merely entertaining claims for other jazz-based wildlife in the Funsville area, such as the Getz Weasel, the Bix Beiderbecke Bison, Lucky Thompson’s Gazelle, the Pee Wee Russell Terrier (a feral crossbreed which lives only in abandoned Model A Fords), the Suite Yardbird, and the Djanghart Rhino—but not (thankfully, and for obvious reasons) the Thelonious Monkey.  Without running the risk of making an even worse pun than that (I’m going to make one, but I couldn’t care less how bad it is, so it’s really not much of a risk at all), I’ll  simply close by saying “owl be seeing you”.

Uncle Fun