Getting the Bird

Am I a terrible person?  I only ask because, the other day, I heard something on the radio which was meant to be tragic, but found myself laughing uproariously at it.  In fact, I was laughing so much that I had to stop the car.  I'd like to say that I felt ashamed at finding something so traumatic mirthful.  But I didn't.  But let's back up a bit here.  Obviously, you can't possibly judge just how bad a person I might be unless I explain the source of this fit of hilarity.  As I said, I was in the car listening to PM on Radio Four, it was the bit near the end where they usually have some kind of human interest story.  Anyway, this particular day we're treated to an interview with some bird-watcher, telling us about how he travelled half way around the country after hearing that some rare bird, last seen in the UK four hundred years ago, (or something like that - it might only have been ten years, but you get the picture).  After he and several other bird-watchers had observed and photographed the bird, which is renowned for its aerobatic capabilities, tragedy struck. 

Now, by this point it was clear that the denouement of the story would be the bird's sudden demise. My money was on the bird-watcher revealing that, as he and his fellow hobbyists watched, a domestic cat leaped out of nowhere and caught it mid-aerial manoeuvre, before proceeded to mark the bird off in its 'Observer's Book of Extremely Rare Birds', that every cat carries.  (I'm convinced that all felines have copies of this or a similar tome and try to complete sets of rare bird species they've killed and eaten.  Indeed, when The Guardian was going through that phase a few years ago of issuing free wall charts on every subject under the sun, I ended up giving the garden birds one to a local cat in the hope that it would help him improve his bird-killing rate).  But I was wrong.  Instead of falling prey to a cat attack, the bird-watcher described, in mournful tones, how, as it performed some complex aerobatics, the bird flew straight into the blades of a wind turbine.  It was at this point that I started laughing uncontrollably.  I'm sorry, but it was a combination of the mental picture this conjured up and the sombre tones in which the story was delivered which just made it seem hilarious to me.  I'm clearly a very bad person.