A rare American cuckoo has been been stolen and then viciously killed in Liverpool. Our reporter in Merseyside explains...
It’d had been a morning like any other, local lad, Kenny Koogan (originally from Rotherham but has also lived in Newcastle) had been busy with his usual daily routine of chasing local scallys out of his kitchen, patching up the smashed window in his XR3i and booting a few homeless geriatrics out of his garden. He was just tidying up the remnants from the latest bin dipping episode when his ever shifty eyes caught sight of a flash of gold at the bottom of his boundary Privet hedge – ‘’I was startled like, though it was a gold earring from some local lass who’d lost it in mi garden like, cos they use mi garden as a knocking shop ya know, to get a bit of latchlifter. I dived on it like Grobbelaar but I was proper shocked when the bit of gold turned out to be the beak of some brown parrot . I held it for a minute and wa gonna throw it back in the hedge bottom but then it looked at me with these like moody eyes and felt a twang of pity so I took it in the house and put it in the cage with mi grey parrot that I got off Billy the Fish down the Pinch & Penny last Sunday dinner. Anyhow, Horace, mi parrot, didn’t like the new bird, kept pecking its arse and that so I lobbed the new bird into a cage I’d got from when we used t’go down field catching magpies for Rita at number 53. She’s a gypsy ya know and uses their feathers for telling fortune and that. I put cage in garden so bird could get some air and that then went in to watch How safe is your shed ont I-Player’’
Sadly, Kenny was in for a shock when he stepped back outside later to chain his wheelie bin up for the night ‘’The fucking bird had gone! Some thieving bastard had nicked mi new pet! I was off my head with anger and that and even kicked Jerry, next doors cat that was sitting on my new patio. But I soon calmed down when I heard that our Sharon’s mate, Mandy was coming round to borrow a CD off me. She’s dead fit and that. Anyhow like when she’d bin and gone, I went down to Threashers for some tinny’s and Fat Mal from Nesbitt Street was walking towards me and he’d got my new parrot but it was dead and its gold face thing was missing’’ I asked him where the fuck he’d got it and he said to me that he’d just bought it from Garry Menzie who’d chopped its beak off and took it to that shop on high street where they give ya few quid for some bling. I asked Mal what he were doing with the body and said he were taking it give to his Ferrets, Mick & Mike. Anyhow, I’m dead gutted and that’’
Sadly, Kenny then had to leave us as his mother rang to say someone had just set fire to her dog.
Thankfully we managed to track down Kenny's pal, Fat Mal and luckily he had yet to set his ferrets loose on the corpse so with a bit of bartering and us being left £37 lighter he allowed us to take it. After having the remains analysed it transpires that the feathers actually belong to a member of the Cuckoo family, A Yellow-billed Cuckoo from America! Our contact in the 'Liverpudlian Good Relations Embassy' also known as the L.G.R.E was informed of the sad events and offered to cover up the story by releasing the news in a more sedate manner. The L.G.R.E did a stirling job and earlier this evening the following message was broadcast by various birdwatchers information services -
M’yside Yellow-billed Cuckoo y’day Liverpool in garden taken into care then died.
