Scottish Class: Module One - Hummingbirds

I know you want to know what happened to the hummingbirds, but first we need to answer an important question:

What is IRN-BRU?

First of all, if you haven't been to Scotland, or you're not one of those rare unfortunates that I have targeted on my visits to Canada as deserving particular abuse, you have never encountered this Scottish enigma, and likely don't care. Well true to my Scottish heritage, I don't care that you don't care. 

So shut up and keep reading. This is important.


IrnBru (pronounced "Iron Brew" not "Urn Bra" as
most seem to think at first glance) is a bright, well fluorescent actually, orange beverage that tastes like a suspicious combination of water, sugar and red shoe polish.  It is so much more than that.  What they don't tell you is that IrnBru is made from fermented Haggis Poo, just like whisky.

Artist's rendition of a wild haggis

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 Haggisses  (Haggi?) if you didn't know, are shy creatures that live in the highlands of Scotland. They are orange (ginger) in colour, and are shaped sort of like an egg, with four legs, but the legs on one side are usually significantly shorter than the legs on the other, causing the animal to travel in circles.  The Wild Haggis is fierce as a badger and surprisingly fast despite its disability; many a highlander has lost fingers and toes in pursuit of this rare delicacy. Now of course they have the Haggis farms up near Pitlochry. These are large circular fences that have been erected around the base of a number of hills in Perthshire that act sort of like a race track to keep the Haggis from wandering off. Instead, they just come around the mountain again and again and again.

 A variety of whiskies: note the colour

Wild Haggis poo is the most important ingredient in the peat used for making whisky. It is also the reason Highland water is so coveted as a product for purchase. The makers of IrnBru decided to not only use pure highland spring water, but they actually ferment the haggis poo by adding sugar and letting it sit in large open tubs for the whole summer. By Autumn, a deep orange syrup is drained off. This they dilute with carbonated highland spring water to make the coveted drink, IrnBru.

A couple of summers back, a friend and I decided to perform some experiments to see if Irn Bru really was the reason why there are so many gingers in Scotland. We spent several weeks interviewing as many redheads as we could find and we learned that most of them drank Irn Bru as children. Most of them also seemed to be missing their teeth, but we decided that this was unimportant to our study at the time. More importantly, many of them confirmed that their parents also drank a substantial amount of IrnBru prior to their birth. You can see Kelly's Stalking Gingers blog here.




We did learn from one man that whisky seems to provide an increased chance of having a ginger baby, if ingested by the man shortly before .. er.. copulation.  I didn't really understand everything the fellow said, for that matter, neither did my voice recorder, but apparently whisky is the Scottish version of beer goggles.  He explained that despite being a "darkie" himself, he has four ginger kids from four different mothers, and apparently this is due to whisky making him blind to "theys mouns o' clown foz ain ther nether's"  ..  I'll leave that untranslated for the sake of censorship.

The Hummingbirds:

Scotland doesn't have hummingbirds. It is thought that they mistook IrnBru for the similarly coloured feeders that still adorn backyards in other less-Scottish places. Hummingbirds pretty much live off straight sugar, which probably explains why they live in a constant state of fast-forward. Now imagine adding highly concentrated caffeine and some creative petroleum by-products to their diet. ZOOM!! Suddenly, all the hummingbirds disappeared!! There are two popular theories currently supported by scientists today.  The first is that the Hummingbirds simply exploded.

Ginger Sheep, very common in the remote highlands

 Some think this was due to their small bodies being poorly equipped to contain such a high level of energy, and others believe they created so much friction by increasing their speed that they spontaneously combusted. I figure that since we didn't start finding piles of exploded birds or charred mounds of colourful feathers, that this was not the case. The more popular theory is that the sudden burst of energy sent the little birds from fast-forward into full warp!  They are still here, but now they are either moving so fast that we can't see them, or they have zipped off into Scotland's future, maintaining this warp state until the IrnBru was all burned off, and a few decades or centuries from now, the country is going to be hit by a massive swarm of bezerker hummingbirds suffering withdrawal from Irn Bru!






 The important points we have learned here are as follows:

1) Irn Bru is made from haggis poo

2) Only Scottish people can stomach it

3) Haggis is a small vicious animal that orbits hills in the highlands

4) Irn Bru and Whisky are both made from haggis poo juice, and are largely responsible for the inordinate number of redheads found in Scotland

5) Irn Bru is the reason there are no hummingbirds in Scotland

6) Scottish companies have no shame when it comes to advertising! (see below)