The person in Big Bird's costume (muppeteer Carroll Spinney) had to hold up the 3.5 lb head with his arm and manipulate the beak with his hand, which could only be done about ten minutes each time.

Now! Owing to popular demand, the first t in this write-up has been changed to a T. Also, many folks wrote to their congressman suggesting that puppeteer be changed to muppeteer. Done! Enjoy the buffet!
Big Bird from the show Sesame Street, is six (originally four).
He was born March 20.
In Follow That Bird they painted him blue for a bit but he's really yellow.
His best friend is Snuffy The Snuffle-upagus.
His favorite food is birdseed soup, peanut and birdseed sandwiches, and birdseed ice cream. and favorite drink is birdseed floats / birdseed milkshakes.(Sense a pattern here?)
He's 8 feet and 2 inches tall, and his favorite colour is yellow.

WHAT BIG BIRD HAS IN HIS NEST AREA:
A Bubble- gum dispenser
A clock with no hands
A feather duster
A football helmet
A golf ball with a club
A hurricane lamp
A megaphone
A picture of MR,Hooper (A.K.A. Looper, Pooper, Dooper, and Sooper.)
A Roman bust
A tricycle wheel
A watering can
An old record player
An unbrella
A mail box
Snowshoes
And some Books.
Cryptozoology or mass hysteria? The monstrous creature known as Big Bird terrorized parts of south central Texas in the mid-1970s.

It all started in 1976 when two San Benito policemen, Arturo Padilla and Homer Galvan, reported seeing strange black bird-like shapes flying in the early morning skies. A resident of Brownsville, Texas, Alverico Guajardo, later reported hearing a thumping noise outside his mobile home one night -- he looked out to discover a gigantic bird standing in his front yard. "It's like a bird, but it's not a bird," he later said. "That animal is not from this world."

As sightings of the giant bird grew, a radio station offered a reward for the creature's capture, a TV station broadcast a picture of a 12-inch-long bird track, and the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, fearful that drunken monster hunters would start shooting every bird they saw, released a statement reminding people that most birds were protected by various state and federal laws. In February, several schoolteachers driving to work saw a creature with a twelve-foot wingspan which buzzed their cars; one of the teachers identified it as a prehistoric gliding dinosaur called a pterosaur.

Coincidentally (wink wink, nudge nudge), just a few years earlier, in 1974, paleontologists made a big, high profile find -- the largest known pterosaur, discovered in Big Bend National Park in southwest Texas. Dubbed Quetzalcoatlus by scientists and the Texas Pterosaur by everyone else, it had an incredible 50-foot wingspan, making it the largest flying animal ever. Unlike most other pterosaurs, it lived inland and probably scraped by as a scavenger.

While some people believed that the Big Bird was a living fossil -- a dinosaur which somehow survived to the present day -- most other people suspected that the publicity over the Texas Pterosaur encouraged misidentifications, hallucinations, and outright hoaxes. At any rate, long before the middle of that bicentennial year, sightings of the monster dwindled and finally disappeared as the Big Bird faded back into the shadows.

POSSIBLE SPOILERS

Bigbirds are not introduced until the second novel in the Charon Trilogy, "Charon's Children."

A species of intelligent dinosaur from the as-yet-unpublished1 second and third books of the Charon's Ark trilogy: Charon's Children and Charon is Coming.

The creation of science fiction writer Rick Gauger2. The nickname "big bird" is due to their muppetish appearance: big birds have a large forehead (a necessary adaptation of the cranium to house the neocortex); walk bipedally, and have forward-facing eyes with stereoscopic vision. They also have feathered heads, arms, and necks, which is not as far-fetched as it seems. Many fossils of small carnivorous dinosaurs have been found with the traces of feather impressions in the rock around them.

These traits make Charlie see in them a superficial resemblance to the beloved Sesame Street character. They inhabit a tribal civilization organized in Roosts (notably Sesame Roost, Capon Roost and Big Dustbath Roost) with approximately Bronze Age-level technology for the majority of the population, and access to high-tech and the Ark Computer granted to Capons, who can be likened to patricians or priests.

The Big Birds provide a great deal of comic relief to both novels, one or two even becoming featured characters, most notably Lower Capon 223, aka No Gonads, who is the first bigbird to communicate with Charlie Freeman. Charlie can speak to and understand the bigbirds via a babelfish-like technology supported by the Ark Computer. Charlie speaks in English, and computer implants pick up the meaning and broadcast it in Bigbird from a small speaker mounted on Charlie's chest. The computer also hears bigbird speech, and feeds an English translation into a set of earplugs for Charlie. Bigbird speech is described as sounding something like a gang of kindergarteners with woodwinds, punctuated by the occasional airhorn or goose.

The bigbirds are the children of a breeding program of forced evolution, instrumented by a select few members of the Charonese, otherwise known as the Crew. The Crew bred the bigbirds into intelligent, bipedal beings for the express purpose of Recruiting them into the Ark Computer once they achieved high enough intelligence. The bigbirds would then become Crewmembers. The Crewmembers keep the bigbirds from overunning the planet by enclosing them in a large area known as the Barrier. This plan is interrupted at the end of Charon's Ark by a largescale attack by the Proctor against the Crew.

The following is an excerpt from Gauger's holograph book, a collection of notes on Charon is Coming. The following was simply titled, "Dialog Two by the Grunts" and is an argument between two Bigbird soldiers (as heard via computer translation).

"In the name of Plentypossums, sergeant, let us ditch these greasy aliens immediately, and remove our copulations to another locality!"
"You ignorant yolk-sac! Do you not realize that there is nowhere to flee from the Proctor, except to the Capon Roost?"
"Then let us go there at once! I am fed up with being ordered about by bush-dwelling tribesroosters, capons, and overgrown eupantotheres from outer space!"
"Corporal, your thoughts are as the droppings of the far-flying quetzalcoatlus, i.e. they stink, and they fall wide of the mark! Go alone? Did you not see what the robot did to Lieutenant Fuzz? Best we go in convoy, with the humans! Thus staying under the guns of the human war machines! And the best way to do that, corporal, is to cling to the greasy aliens as though they were precious bags of the purest Rip Ruff Roost Ale!"

1 The third book is now completed, and the author is awaiting word from Del Rey on the possibility of publication. The first book, Charon's Ark, is available in used condition from various places.
2Also known for "The Vacuum-Packed Picnic" In: OMNI. September, 1979, Vol., 1, No. 12

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