Hold it. Hold whatever it is you've got in your hands. Hold it tightly, because there is new news (or, as I nearly typed, wen swen).

A recently discovered manuscript, found in the the lower reaches of Castle Rising and dated from the time of Good King Art(hur), discusses the problem of bird droppings in great and rather disgusting detail.

The birds were not usually chickens, for as Janie has pointed out chickens were (usually) considered sacred. Sure, chickens were sometimes involved, but the heretics and apostates who involved chickens were splashed with sacred oil and roasted on a gridiron. This was called a "chicken barbi cue" (from the ancient Pictish goddes "Barbi" and the Indo-European proto-word from which the word "cook" is derived) and was quite The Event.

Back to bird droppings.

Birds, usually caught in the now-extinct towns of Byrde Lyme and Byrde Nette, would be gathered and confined in boxes. To the music of cithera and bagpipes the boxes would be taken to a high place where and ceremoniously released by the high priests. (Note that according to the manuscript only priests did this; the priestesses remarked "What a stupid guy thing! Barbi is gonna be reeeealllly pissed off if them birds get hurt!)

Naturally, most of the birds simply flew away. But a few, and especially chickens, would fall all to the ground many meters below. The sudden stop did the bird little, if any, good.

As this denegrated from some sort of religious rite it became a game children and young pages played, especially at Camelot: they would take a bird up into the rafters of the Great Hall and try to make a dead-center bulls-eye on the Round Table. Chickens would take some extraordinary bounces when they hit and it was considered good fortune to have one of them bounce into your lap or wine cup. The other knights would yell in unison, "You're Chicken!" to the lucky receptor.

That's where the idea of bird droppings came from. (It should be noted that the modern town of Talkeetna, Alaska has an annual celebration similar to this ancient ceremony, but having no birds the natives of Talkeetna celebrate Moose Droppings.)