I believe I have figured out what the chih-bird is.
It’s going to sound like tinfoil-hat stuff to a lot of you; all I can say is that I am not particularly paranoid, am stable emotionally, and not given to delusions as near as I can tell.
Anyway, this is what I think:
It’s an electronic bird analogue. It starts out making a repetitive “chih” sound, probably to get real birds to respond with their own calls. Then it samples those calls, analyzes, and mimics them. (I don’t think it’s simply playing the birdcalls back.)
Since there are mostly crows and the occasional seagull around here making calls that carry at all, that’s what it simulates. The problem is, while crows will often caw three times in a row, they don’t always do that; and while they often have a roughly equal time between calls, they often don’t, or they do that cool beak thing in between.
The calls that I believe are artificial are always exactly the same; the same number of calls in a row at exactly the same interval. Furthermore, the mechanics of a genuine birdcall involve air, organic tissue, resonance etc., and while the calls are convincing enough if you don’t really notice birds anyway and aren’t paying attention, they really sound more like a toy bird.
I have heard the chih birds almost around the clock, all around town. And while two weeks ago they were almost constant, now I hear them infrequently, and am hearing more of the questionable other birdcalls instead.
Certainly the technology to do all these things exists. Oh, and there’s one more thing contributing to my theory: occasionally something will go wrong with one of these birds, like once recently when there were a bunch of police aircraft around where I work because of someone waving a gun outside a schoolyard. The birds will fly around in a tight circle going “chihchihchihchihchihchichichichichi!!!” in a very very fast and unnatural way, and then the sound will degrade into a “something is wrong with my Speak & Spell” kind of thing.
It would be so awesome if they would then explode… Alas, no. They vanish or whatever. Back to the source, maybe.
Well, there you have it. I won’t venture a guess on what the purpose of such a thing would be. I don’t even know why I felt it was necessary to tell anyone about it. But there it is.
