An Espionage Flap

The A-Hed piece in yesterday's WSJ tells the story of a pigeon who has been thought to be a spy. Turns out it isn't, wasn't, but merely a racing pigeon who flew considerably off course, say from Taiwan to India.

It is a fairly typical A-Hed piece in that there are puns, maybe more puns that usual. The ink drawing of a pigeon that graces the front page in the center of the story is captioned, "Speculation flew." And that's only the beginning.

Other puns sprinkled throughout:
...convinced he had committed a crime most fowl.
...officials flocked to the scene
...it [the pigeon] was, by nature after all, a flight risk.
...was no stool pigeon.
...didn't want to ruffle any feathers...
...accidentally booked a passage to India.
...Even if the pigeon was a mole.

Attention was drawn to the bird because it had been flying near the docks where there was good deal of international shipping. Additionally, the bird had some kind of writing on its feathers, and there were rings attached to its feet, one of which turned out to hold a microchip with an alphanumeric code: 776912 CTPRA 2023. Certainly suspicious since even ChatGPT couldn't decipher it. 

Tensions between India and China have been strained since there had been a bloody clash between the nations' soldiers in 2020 leaving fatalities on both sides. No one used the phrase Red Alert, but both nations are now even more leery of each other.

After eight month's of trying to figure out what to do, forensic testing and just plain detention, the police gave the green light to release the bird from the veterinary hospital where it was being made to stay, well taken care of, but a POF—prisoner of flight— nonetheless. PETA had been repeatedly calling for the bird's release claiming the authorities were violating the bird's fundamental right to fly.

On the bird's release, India's Assistant Police Inspector Patil said , "the entire Indian sky now belongs to the pigeon." (The bird remained unnamed.)

Anyone who has been following the news here in New York and social media knows there is an orange-eyed Eurasian eagle owl named Flaco that has escaped its vandalized enclosure in the Central Park Zoo and been flying uptown and downtown throughout Manhattan.

Flaco has been spotted on top of water towers, on fire escapes and window ledges looking through apartment windows. No one has thought of Flaco as being a spy bird, but certainly a case can be made.

Casing out water supplies, methods of escape and being nosy in search of empty apartments could easily put Flaco on a "bird of interest" list.

Flaco shows no inclination to come in from the cold. And like any good spy, he shows the ability to be turned. His head turns in more angles than Kim Philby's did.

That Flaco might be an agent of a real estate firm looking for empty apartments doesn't yet seem to be speculated on, but it certainly is a possibility.

If spotted, approach cautiously.

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