The Prize Is Right

(CBS)

My story for tonight's CBS Evening News is a feature reporter's dream. Stranger than fiction kind of stuff. Viewers voted to send me to intervew this year's Ig Nobel prize winners. Not NOBEL prize winners -- IG Nobel prize winners. IG Nobel winners are honored for what the awards commitee calls their "improbable research." One guy studied why uncooked Spaghetti often breaks into more than two pieces. Another guy researched why woodpeckers don't get headaches. And it gets weirder from there.

But my favorite part of this story has very little to do with this year's winners. It has to do with a guy I met at a cocktail party after the ceremony. He was a former winner from The Netherlands who once published a paper on homosexual necrophilia in malard ducks (how much do you wanna bet they don't let me say that on television tonight?). Anyway, he began telling me about this black bird he'd heard about and had begun investigating. For 2 years the bird has been flying into the same plate glass window. Over and over and over -- it crashes into the window, picks itself up and crashes into the window again! It apparently does this for fun. Best of all he has video and he's letting me show it tonight.

YouTube, eat your heart out.

Steve Hartman

Steve Hartman is a CBS News correspondent. He brings viewers moving stories from the unique people he meets in his weekly award-winning feature segment "On the Road."

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