A whistle shrieked through the clearing-one perfect note so loud and shrill it knocked a purple spy bird out of the closest tree and drew the Nausicaan up short.

"But those spy birds weren't up there two days ago," Briggs said.

Do you think you can twist the tail of one of the spy birds and have it look down in that direction and see what it can make out?

As he gets closer, the imagery he's looking at shifts from the long-range pictures coming in from the geosynchronous satellites to the good stuff being spewed into the CIC computer from a whole fleet of low-flying spy birds.

A spy bird would tell us, one way or the other.

Also stowed in the box, under a false bottom, was that talking spy bird I had been lumbered with.

Like nearly everyone else in the world, the Iranians knew when America's spy birds were overhead and made sure that they didn't do anything that would look suspicious while their cameras were watching.

And I still had the electronic spy bird!

In December 2012, a Sudanese newspaper reported that the Sudan government had captured a vulture, in the town of Kereinek, which they said was an Israeli spy bird and was tagged in Hebrew and equipped with electronic devices.

Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post also linked the two events, writing that Arab media and officials who circulate fantasies of Mossad sharks and spy birds "deserve to be mocked".