By the bruised dawn of the third day, every car, rooftop, and byway was caked with the stilton cheese of bird droppings. Every lawn was matted, sewers were clogged. Birds had converged from far and wide, from every continental state, many of them not indigenous here. Finches, warblers, rare merganser ducks and trumpeter swans. Canaries that according to televised reports had gone flapping mad in their cages until their owners had reached in to calm them, inadvertently setting them free. Telephone wires hung low under their weight, trees screamed like cacophonous boom-box speakers.

~ Michael Conn @ Pequin