Duration 2.49
Erhaus Bewler Falluper: "Starting at the buzzer, in thirty seconds, name for me as many birds as you can think of."
Corntopia: "Partridge, parrot, peacock, blue tit, coal tit, willow tit, bearded tit, marsh tit, long-tailed tit, great tit, woodcock..."
One factor that undoubtedly influenced the present selection of names to represent all the other Violent Unknown Event victims was a collection of interviews filmed some eighteen months before the VUE by Erhaus Bewler Falluper.
Erhaus Bewler Falluper: "Starting at the buzzer, in thirty seconds, tell me as much as you can about the emu."
Corntopia: "The emu is the national bird of Australia..."
Falluper, a professional statistician interested in assessing the public's general knowledge, conducted one particular survey by asking forty-one interviewees three elementary ornithological questions. To assure a random sample, Falluper chose to use all the names in the same Public Records Office file as himself. Seven of these forty-one subjects later became VUE victims. And Corntopia Fallas was one of them.
Although happy for us to use material of her filmed before the VUE, Corntopia had no wish to be photographed at the present time for her sleep would be disturbed. For Corntopia spends the cold months of the year in hibernation in this cottage a few miles from the Boulder Orchard on the Lleyn Peninsula.
The VUE had lowered Corntopia's body temperature and slowed her circulation. She suffered badly from the cold. She was happiest when asleep and she dreamt of water. The dreams, said her doctor, were a compensation for her experiences on the night of the Event, when Corntopia had been rescued from a serious forest fire.
Rapper Begol: "Actually you can see the black part just there..."
Rapper Begol, Second Custodian of the Boulder Orchard and personal friend of Corntopia's, was working as a Forestry Commissioner at the time of the VUE and he remembers the fire.
Rapper Begol: "And we thought we'd won the battle. The wind changed, whipped the fire up again and it started going round the hill."
Round about the first of May, Corntopia rises from her hibernation, and needing little sleep during the summer months, is prepared to work eighteen hours a day on the weekly WSPB magazine, The Rooster.
Erhaus Bewler Falluper: "Starting at the buzzer, in thirty seconds, name for me as many birds as you can that start with the letter W."
Corntopia: "Whooper swan, wigeon, wagtail..."
To announce Corntopia's return, the magazine printed on its cover a photograph of the will, or the poor-will, sometimes known as the sleeper, a bird that lay dormant for weeks on end without detectable heartbeat in the cliff crevices of the Sierra Nevada.
The Falls Biographies
