You owe me two minutes and twenty seconds.
Actually, this-all reminds me a little bit of an example of where my doubting Thomas attitude was wrong.
Back in the 60s, early 70s, a shooting buddy of mine used to ice fish up on Gross Reservoir or one of the mountain lakes. This outdoorsey pursuit was not for little old soft-skinned me as being too cold. Not that I minded freezing my soft pink ass off in other winter pursuits, but I basically don't like fish anyhow...
...Anyhow, on coming back from one of his trips, he told me that he had fired a bullet from his 9mm pistol (I think it was a P-38 he'd brought back from WWII) into the ice to kind of start a pilot hole for drilling his ice-fishing hole, and the bullet just kind of bounced back out of the ice and stood there on its nose spinning like mad and he figured I might be able to explain this very odd behavior. He had just fired the shot, made a little hole, and was getting his drill/auger ready and heard this buzzing sound and found the bullet standing there spinning.
Well, long story short, I thought he was BSing me --we joked around man-to-man a lot --but I didn't call him a liar since I respected him quite a bit. After kicking it around for a while, I just said I didn't know what was going on and I forgot about it.
A couple of years later I read in one of the gun magazines where a writer had the same thing happen to him, a bullet spinning on ice, but he then went on to describe his five thousand yard shot in a strong 9 o'clock wind, in the fog, across a canyon, on a full-curl B&C mountain sheep. Don't remember the writer or the outdoor mag, but I decided to try it out myself on the frozen creek on my little farm. I fired maybe 10 shots into the ice with my 1911, 230 grain FMJs, and could not make it work. Nines were not yet popular, this being about 1980.
Ahhhh, but then came the millenium and the internet and dot-MOVs and son of a gun, so many reports and videos of exactly this happening just about everywhere in the world, with so many different variables (frozen lake, farmyard puddle, MythBusters trying it) and so few opportunities for trickery (magnetic coils buried in the ice, etc), with so many different cartridges, that I had to believe that it was an actual phenomenon.
I couldn't explain it, especially since the expectation would be a ricochet or a penetration, but there it was.
Maybe Penn and Teller can explain the gaff, but I can't.
So maybe that's what's happening with the firebrand birds, but it's going to take a mass of evidence, like with the bullets spinning on ice, to convince me.
Terry, 230RN