The doctors of Luckycola were overrun with nervous mothers and their asthmatic school children, their breathing thinned and made ragged by the fine feathers that fell hourly, forming
drifts of down against buildings and light-posts. That winter,
when thousands of elderly men and women succumbed to a
pernicious type of pneumonia, the crisis was attributed to a rare
respiratory condition, known euphemistically to specialists as
Bird Fanciers’ Lung.
always been thus, the President had pointed out. The country of
Incognita had always been at risk of being over-run by migratory
birds. The last of the gaps in the great wall would finally be
filled in, he told the people, and a million square metres of
flight-proof netting would temporarily protect the eastern seaboard from the plague of predatory birds.
