A fisherman in Egypt’s southern governorate of Qena recently captured what he thought was a duck with a suspicious metallic device attached to its back. Thinking the duck might be a spy, he turned it over to the Coalition of Arab Tribes who, in turn, filed a police report, and the “duck” was put under arrest and ended up in jail as a Zionist spy. Really.
It was later discovered that the duck was, in fact, a white stork, a common migratory bird in the area at this time of year, and that the metallic device was, in fact, a satellite tracking device used by French scientists to follow the movement of migrating birds. “Menes,” as the bird was known by the scientists, was one of 115 migrating birds being tracked by a consortium of European wildlife organizations.
The good news is that “Egyptian conservationists intervened to assure police of the bird’s innocence, and on September 2, after a full investigation, he was paroled to the Saluga and Ghazal islands’ protected area, south of Aswan.” The bad news is that “days later, local residents caught Menes and ate him. Don’t be mad: People gotta eat. As the NGO Nature Conservation Egypt noted on Facebook, ‘storks have been part of the Nubian diet for thousands of years, so the actual act of eating storks is not in itself a unique practice…Egypt has long suffered from issues of uncontrolled hunting’” (Dan Morrison, National Geographic News Correspondent, “The Sad Ballad of Menes, the Egyptian #Spyduck“).
Egypt has been in political turmoil after the ouster and imprisonment of Islamist president Mohammed Morsi on July 3 by the army, so it isn’t surprising that authorities and citizens are highly suspicious of anything foreign. In January, a carrier pigeon was captured in the Egyptian governorate Qalyubia and was sent to the criminal investigation department after a message was found attached to one of its feet and a microfilm to the other. In 2010, sensationalist reports surfaced in the local media on ‘GPS-controlled sharks’ allegedly sent by Israel to Sinai shores (source).
“So a strange chapter has ended. Meanwhile, in the Maldives, a coconut has been detained on suspicion of election rigging” (Morrison, op. cit.). It’s true: “The coconut…was found near a school that will be used as a polling station on Saturday on the remote Kaafu atoll, one of the hundreds of islands that comprise the Indian Ocean archipelago state. Though the population of the Maldives is Sunni Muslim, continuing belief in magic is widespread in rural areas. Coconuts are often used in rituals and inscribed with spells…A magician summoned by police established that the coconut was innocent, local officials have said. No arrests have been made” (source).
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. While the “quack-down” on a “duck” and nutty suspicions about a coconut smack of paranoia, it is estimated that our own CIA has attempted to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro several hundred times, using bizarre methods that allegedly included an exploding cigar, a fungal-infected scuba-diving suit along with an exploding conch placed on the sea bottom, lethal pills, a ballpoint pen containing a hypodermic syringe preloaded with Black Leaf 40 concoction, and a plain, mafia-style execution (Wikipedia: Assassination attempts on Fidel Castro). As they say in the UK, “duck or grouse.”
Article by Bill Norrington; more on this general subject can be found here.
