SATIRE. Fiction. No real people, agencies, towns or contracts are described below.
For three seasons, researchers tracked the spread of Flockus surveillanceus across a region of unremarkable intersections, expecting the usual environmental predictors. Elevation explained nothing. Rainfall explained nothing. Traffic volume explained slightly less than nothing.
The breakthrough came when a graduate student overlaid the sightings onto a stack of approved purchase orders and the two maps matched almost perfectly, including one improbable specimen roosting behind a municipal salt shed.
'It appears to be a paperwork-dependent species,' the lead researcher wrote. 'Where the requisition goes, the bird follows. We have not yet observed one arriving before the invoice.'
The team's next study will attempt to determine whether the species can survive a renewal vote. Early indications suggest it can survive several.