Life, what a hoot, right? One minute you're floating aimlessly like a feather in the wind; the next, you're plummeting faster than a penguin on a bullet slide, dashing headlong into the existential abyss. And that's just breakfast time in my case. But, let's talk about Peter 'Birdman' Kaestner. Must’ve been nice to chase fluffy colorful distractions rather than slowly lose your marbles, huh?
This master of masquerade, the endearingly loony Pete, was on a kamikaze mission to spot all the 11,000 avian species! With 9,697 birds ticked off his bucket list, he was close to affirming his existential purpose, or so it seemed.
Yet, some birds proved as elusive as the meaning of life itself. Our hero could not shift his bird-goggles away from the memories of these elusive fowls. That Congo peacock – a polychromatic phenomenon hiding its sexual frustration behind the veil of the Central African rainforest – dodged him in 1978, when his bird-seeking party was ridiculed by a comic series of unfortunate events. Too bad, the laughing hyenas didn’t find it funny.
Then there was the brooding black-browed albatross – a nihilist poet of the avian world. Kaestner pursued him across 300 miles and a four-hour ferry ride from his Frankfurt home, expecting the albatross to welcome him with open wings. Instead, it preferred seclusion and, perhaps, ate raw fish ice-cream on a lonely Friday night.
But the story doesn’t end here. What drives a man to such utter madness? What cosmic joke unfolds before us in this meaningless journey towards an ever-receding horizon? Welcome to existence, my friends, a futile attempt to list every species of bird, sprinkle some salt on the wound, then laugh uproariously as the wind carries the sound away.
Death – the great punchline of life – is still waiting to laugh at the joke he himself wrote. I guess Schneider's Pitta will get the last laugh at Pete's funeral. After all, he did say he always wanted to die alone. Though he didn’t mention if he wanted to die surrounded by birds. What a tweet way to go!
Based on the original article "The Eternal Search for the ‘Nemesis Bird’".
