“The Ugly Chickens.” By Howard Waldrop
“The Ugly Chickens” is a short story written by Howard Waldrop in 1980 about a twenty-six year old graduate student named Paul Linberl who teaches ornithology, the study of birds, at the University of Texas. As he is reading through the book Extinct and Vanishing Birds of the World, a woman sitting near him on the bus recognizes a bird from her childhood named the dodo, supposed to have been extinct for a long time. At first he was reluctant to believe her because it was impossible for anyone to have seen a dodo bird, but the old woman knew things only a professional or someone who had actually been in the presence of a dodo would know. This was the beginning of his long journey to find evidence that the dodo bird, thought to have been extinct for about three or four hundred years, was actually around in the 1900’s.
Ornithology is a unique branch of science because it is based primarily on observation. Paul Linberl was given a hint that the idea of a dodo bird being extinct wasn’t necessarily true until the early 1900’s, instead of the previous centuries like most experts believed. He set out to see if this hypothesis was correct by gathering data and observing information about the dodo bird. Most of his information was gathered by word of mouth. He got information from the old woman on the bus, then from the Krait family, and from them finally got in touch with Ms. Smith. Ms. Smith was old friends with the woman on the bus who recognized the dodo bird. Ms. Smiths’ family inherited and raised dodo birds and had old pictures to prove it. The pictures were from the late 1920’s and proved that these birds weren’t extinct until around that time. Waldrop used ornithology in this story in a reasonable fashion based on the science at this time. As previously stated, ornithology is based observation and that is exactly what he did. He observed and proved his hypothesis using the information he found.
Waldrop portrayed the scientist, Paul Linberl, as a regular person, unlike other science fiction stories that portray them as mad scientist and the like. He was a young graduate student at the University of Texas who catches the bus and has a job, just like Ms. Smith and the old woman on the bus. He had a family just like the Krait’s. He was just a regular, normal person. This story is a good example of true science.