PREAMBLE
We, the Barn Owls of these United States—silent-winged, heart-faced, architecturally superior in every measurable capacity—in order to form a more perfect symbol, establish aesthetic justice, ensure domestic credibility, provide for the common sense that apparently left the building in 1782, promote the general awareness that you picked the wrong bird, and secure the blessings of competence for ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Bill of Flights.
Let the record show: we didn’t start this. Benjamin Franklin wanted a turkey. We could have lived with the turkey. The turkey is a disaster, but at least it’s an honest disaster. The turkey looks you in the eye and says I am a round, stupid bird and I have made peace with that. The Bald Eagle looks you in the eye and says nothing, because it’s too busy eating a raccoon it found on the shoulder of I-95.
This document was drafted in a single night, by moonlight, in a hayloft outside Chillicothe. It is better than the original, which took a whole summer and had to be done twice.
For the record, our résumé: one Barn Owl family removes upward of three thousand rodents a year from American agriculture. We do not invoice. We have never once been thanked by a grain elevator.
We’re done being polite about it.
AMENDMENT I
Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of a Barn Owl to point out, at any time, in any setting, to anyone who will listen and several who will not, that the Bald Eagle is a fish bird.
A fish bird.
The symbol of the most powerful nation on Earth eats fish it steals from ospreys and picks at roadkill with the table manners of a raccoon in a dumpster. We’ve all seen it. The eagle, hunched on a guardrail, beak-deep in a flattened possum, looking like a founding father who fell off a bar stool. This is your icon. This is what’s on the dollar bill.
The osprey, for its part, has been filing grievances about this since 1782 and has never received a response.
The osprey would also like it noted that it, too, is a fish bird, and has never once pretended otherwise.
Meanwhile: the Barn Owl hunts in total silence. Total. Our flight feathers have serrated leading edges that break turbulence into micro-vortices, eliminating aerodynamic noise at the source. We are, in the clinical language of ornithological science, acoustically invisible.
The eagle sounds like a seagull with a head cold.
Hollywood agrees. Every time an eagle screams in a movie, that’s a red-tailed hawk. They dub it. The national bird can’t even do its own voice.
But sure. Put that on the money.