Everything PETA has ever said about me is true, although I am mellowing a bit with age …

The thought came unbidden, I’m reading about the hundreds of birds that remain unseen by human eyes, and have never been catalogued by Science, and visions of something more brilliant than Blue Chatterer, more vibrant than Indian Crow, dance like sugarplums before my eyeballs …

( … and don’t blame me for the Christmas reference, it’s not yet time for Thanksgiving and yet the entire merchant class has determined you should start shopping already … )

Now that the statute of limitations has worn off I’m allowed to mention some of those dark secrets confessed to guides. We’re often seen as a combination of Mother Theresa and hardened psychologist blanch.

Myself and two other guides were charged with escorting a party of six producers, screenwriters, and directors from Hollywood. Part of an annual outing where each fellow was responsible to pick a fishing venue and book lodging and guides for the entire cabal for three days of fishing.

Each fellow was also required to one-up the fellow before him, by finding some rare or unique material that would be incorporated in a custom fly tied for the entire group. The member who caught the largest fish on the unique fly, won bragging rights for the subsequent year.

As this had been going on for some time, it was an effort to one up the last guy – and niceties like legality and societal constraints had long since been discarded in pursuit of rare and even humorous …

That year the host had found himself in a museum in Mexico, and when the curators weren’t looking had pulled a six inch strand of wool from a serape owned by Pancho Villa…

Naturally it wound up as the body material for a couple dozen dry flies, which were distributed among the contestants. Now that I was party to the dirty little secret, my job was to find a big fish with a yen for a hundred year old dirty gray #14, and record the catch so my two fellows could claim victory.

I thought that was just about the best contest I’d heard about – right up until the release of Midnight Express and six or seven years in a Turkish prison made me rethink yanking a tuft off of Tutankhamen’s burial shroud, which was at the DeYoung in San Francisco.

… and neatly explains my sudden yen to visit the Philippines in advance of all them scholarly birdwatchers. The first fellow to spot a Blue Fanged Fidget, can insist flies just aren’t the same with a tawdry dyed substitute.

… and the only fellow that may be able to one-up a bird never seen by science is the fellow that trips over a frozen million year old Archaeopteryx, recently exposed by global warming.