The Canonization of Bird Droppings

Treee Frogg

Bird Village Bulletin

November 13, 2026

© Wix

Kingfisher once lied about methane from the Bird Village’s droppings (*).

It was a small lie. The kind you tell to look important at dinner.

The skeletons came for him. Shaman Bird scolded him. He apologized. The story ended.

Or it should have...

Far away, scholars found the story. They did not laugh. Scholars never laugh first. They cite first, laugh later -- buried in a footnote.

“This Kingfisher,” they wrote, “is a localized stabilizer.”

“This Kingfisher,” they wrote, “is an archetype.”

“This Kingfisher,” they wrote, “is a model of individuation.”

Kingfisher became a saint. Not by doing anything holy. By being quoted correctly.

The gatekeeper at The Journal of Archetypal Poultry, a prestigious peer-reviewed journal highly regarded by top scholars, was supposed to stop him. That is the job of a gatekeeper: to keep quirky birds out.

But Kingfisher told the joke about the skeletons, and the gatekeeper laughed, and a gatekeeper who laughs is no longer a gatekeeper. He is an audience.

So Kingfisher walked in.

Soon there were hundreds of articles, citing “... Kingfisher (2024) ... Kingfisher (2024) ...Kingfisher (2024).” He was cited so often he began to believe he was important.

This seems to look like the first symptom of being canonized.

Then one morning, a young scholar looked down and said, with genuine horror:

“He produces droppings. I witnessed that.”

The village split.

The Haters said: “Fraud! The droppings prove he is not a saint!”

The Worshippers said: “Miracle! The droppings prove he is a saint! A real saint must have a body!”

They fought for the right to be right. This is the favorite sport of scholars. It requires no wisdom, only stamina.

They held two conferences in two rooms with one thin wall between them, so they could hear each other being wrong.

Meanwhile, on the riverbank, Zhuangzi was fishing. He was not fishing for fish. He was fishing for silence. He was very good at it.

Kingfisher flew down and landed next to him.

“Master,” Kingfisher said, “they are fighting over me, very fiercely. Half of them hate me. Half of them worship me. What should I do?”

Zhuangzi did not look up.

“Have you tried tasting it?” he said.

Kingfisher blinked. “Tasting what?”

“Droppings.”

Kingfisher was horrified. “Eww! Why would I taste my own droppings?”

“Exactly,” Zhuangzi said. “Why would anyone? So why pooping means proving?”

Kingfisher flew back to the fight. The Haters were shouting. The Worshippers were shouting. He landed in the middle, on a small branch, and said, very calmly:

“Have you tried tasting it?”

Silence.

The Haters could not answer. If they said yes, they were disgusting. If they said no, they were not serious scholars.

The Worshippers could not answer. If they said yes, they were disgusting. If they said no, they were not true believers.

A perfect question. The kind that ends a fight not by winning it, but by making everyone realize they were fighting about bird poop.

Kingfisher dropped one more dropping, for punctuation, and flew away.

Zhuangzi finally caught something. It was not a fish. It was a thought. He threw it back.

Shaman Bird, watching from above, said to no one in particular:

“You wanted a saint without droppings. But a saint without droppings is not a saint. Itis a statue. And statues do not fly.”

Got it now?

____

(*) The record of him lying was kept in Wild Wise Weird