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It's one thing if mankind is hunted to extinction by ChatGPT, but I really do object to being executed by Bing.

(https://secretfanspace.dreamwidth.org/2511.html?thread=3169743#cmt3169743 )

Welcome back! Fandom chat, misc creativity, internet weirdness, books, films, anything! Tell meme about it so we can get to the next post title!

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From: (Anonymous)

I haven't read an actual, physical book in a while, so the first thing that sticks out to me is the typesetting. The first page perfectly fits two elaborate, rambling paragraphs describing Tierra del Fuego - you can tell the author had the audiobook in mind while writing them - which transition nicely on page flip into an introduction of Charles Darwin's first foray into the Falkland Islands and his first encounter with these mischievous, hat-stealing birds of prey.

In the second chapter, the book abruptly transforms into a true crime novel. It is 2012, and the author has just discovered the corpse of a juvenile striated caracara known only as G7. No one knows who - or what - killed it, and it is now our mission to find out. This seems to be the plot thread the author is using to stitch together all his meticulous descriptions of the environment and digressions into the people, both modern and historical, who study these birds. It's a little thin, but so far it's working.

I think I'm going to put on The Golden Archipelago while reading this. It's only fitting.

From: (Anonymous)

DD

> No one knows who - or what - killed it, and it is now our mission to find out.

I assume the answer will be something like 'global warming and environmental destruction', but I'm kinda hoping it's 'some madman; we know him as Bird Bothering Bob'.

From: (Anonymous)

The author initially fingered a fight with another caracara as the culprit, but some of the details didn't add up - the victim died from a broken neck, but it didn't look like he'd been in a scuffle. The crime was too clean.

A few months later, researchers spotted a lost chimango - a smaller mainland relative of the striated caracaras on the islands - hanging around some of the flocks of teenage caracaras, trying to find a good opportunity to snatch a bite. He briefly considers the convenient possibility that the chimango might've been the culprit, but rules it out too - chimangos are smart but much smaller, and while they can take out larger prey, they usually target the weak or the injured. G7 was spotted hours before his unfortunate demise, looking just fine.

Besides, chimangos are scavengers, and while something had taken a bite out of the victim's corpse, it had been very careful to only pick out the pectoral muscles. Not really the modus operandi of a bird that had been scraping the last bits of meat off an abandoned carcass. But thinking about this reminded our amateur investigator of a throwaway line he'd read in one of William Henry Hudson's books, where that exact pattern was mentioned as a curious habit of the peregrine falcon.

You can almost hear the pieces clicking into place. Unlike the caracara, which are very much generalists - a strange mishmash of falcon biology and crow behaviors - peregrine falcons have evolved specifically for this kind of kill. They dive-bomb their prey, stunning them so they can't put up a fight, and then use their specially-shaped beaks to snap their spinal cords. It's not common for a peregrine to go after a striated caracara, but they're opportunists and an inexperienced juvenile might've slipped up just enough to be an easy mark.

We'll never know for sure, but it's conclusive enough for this episode of Last Birdcast on the Left.