Yes, Travis, there is a story about the birds! An old one, too, as it goes back to the mid 1970's.
I was living and working in Vancouver, BC at that time, and had recently started reading the newspaper on a daily basis, something i have continued till this day. Up to that point I was completely disinterested in current events, being young and having an entirely eventful life. But when I went to apply for Canadian citizen ship I was quizzed on my knowledge of things Canadian to show that I was indeed qualified for permanent status, and I came up short. I was sent home with instructions to subscribe to a newspaper and return in 6 weeks for a reassessment. And yes, that worked out.
Like here, the Newspaper there had a local section with filler articles and human interest stuff. One day there was a large picture on the front page of this section featuring the local garbage dump. Huge piles of refuse with hundreds of gulls wheeling over them. It was the birds that were in focus, not the garbage, certainly for me anyway, and I noticed a number of them were caught in very nice poses. I traced a few of the better ones and adjusted their size with a copier (or something, I don't really remember that part) and have used them ever since as my standard inlay. When the computer came along I drew them more idealistically in Micrografix Designer and continue to print out patterns up to and including this very day (actually did it this morning for the first time in a couple of months).
With the littlest birds I am no longer following the lines on the paper at all, but rather using them as spatial coordinates, and while the pattern remains the same, the birds I cut are wildly variant and have much more life than they used to. No two the same, and quite a lot of fun to do. You'd have to be a research fanatic to get a sense of what I mean exactly, but there are pictures in my website of birds from all but the earliest guitars I've used them on.
Thanks for asking, I don't think I presented this story online before.
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