dorian has alerted me to the existence of the attack hellbird of ucsd.
this is a photo of the hellbird of ucsd.

and this being our times, here's
the twitter feed, and here's
the facebook group.
a cruel avian air-terrorist in my own place of employ? warrants investigation, bien sur. what follows are the results of my own lunch-hour long bit of national geographic-like sleuthing
first, some history. ucsd was partially designed in the 60s, during the height of vietnam war protests. the designers had goal here: make protests as hard as architecturally possible. to this end, there are no large open easily accessible places at ucsd. the officially sanctioned 'protest zone', the price center, was designed to have confusing winding entrances across multiple levels. turns out this was mostly unfounded, the school could not possible have been more boring and uninterested in anything but cheating on their next biochembio midterm.
nevertheless as the campus grew, the bizarrely shaped, confined price center didn't, cause it couldn't. neither did the windy thin walkways in, causing ever growing crowds to walk ever slower in a confined, unroofed area. a perfect setting for the hell bird.
hell bird lives and preys on one of those price center entrances, a narrow path next to a (tacky) fountain/waterfall thing, at the center
of this google map. see the diagonal heading up and to the right, covered by trees? that's the hellbird dominion.
hell bird takes up residence in a tree then scans. he spends his entire time looking around for a perfect victim, constantly moving around to judge distance. he also bides his time, taking up to a good 5 minutes between attacks.
the victim profile is very open, with one connecting thread. hell bird doesn't appear to care about age, gender, race, or hair style, only that the victim be unaware of it. anyone who looked at hell bird seemed to be safe, and all attacks occurred after the victim has already walked past, and was walking away from hell bird.
the attack itself is simple: hell bird swoops in, and pecks the victim once, before flying away and hiding. hell bird sometimes misses, and whooshes past the near-victim. in those cases, there is sometimes a follow up attack immediately after, sometimes not.
mind you, a lot of people seem to be aware of hellbird. people would run by, or hold their bags over their heads. they were all spared.
i brought my lunch to the grass part at the side of price center, put slayer on the iphone, and had myself a 1 person picnic. a bunch of people seem to be in on it as well cause hell bird had a cheering squad out further back on library walk, plus a few others besides me in quiet audience. gonna have to say that was the most fun i had over lunch in a while.
finally,
iphone pic of hellbird taken by yours untruly, at no small risk to life xor limb