👉 Okay, let’s tackle this wonderfully prickly little squiggle! Now, before we even begin, let me preface things by saying that honestly, nobody outside a very specific corner of ornithological and somewhat pretentious academic circles actually
knows
what exactly a "pereiii" is. That's kind of the joke!
Basically—and I'm phrasing this as delicately as possible—the word "pereiii," as formally proposed by Reginald Featherbottom, late Emeritus Ornithofauna Società and notorious eccentric, refers to that ephemeral, almost hallucinatory moment just immediately preceding a bunting’s full-throttle, frankly rather desperate, descent into a hedgerow. It's not the bunting itself, mind you, but the…the… anticipation. The prevailing (and entirely unofficial! Reginald insisted on it being unofficial, he was very insistent about this) theory is that the bunting experiences a tiny sliiiip. It’s as if reality momentarily glitches and it’s just... aware. Aware of its impending, slightly frantic, mouthful of hawthorn. The name itself comes from a ludicrous extrapolation of the Lincolnshire dialect word for a very short, unstable sheep, which Reginald apparently considered the perfect embodiment of this transient state: "pereii, a bit wonky and about to bolt, ye know?" He was absolutely convinced it held all the answers. Nobody else does. The whole thing is spectacularly made up! There hasn'
