Birds (MIT Mystery Hunt 2020)
| Birds | |
|---|---|
| MIT Mystery Hunt 2020 | |
| Balloon Vendor | |
| Author(s) | Benjamin L de Bivort and Jay Strader |
| Answer | Click to revealDIRGES |
| Statistics | |
| No. solves | 37 |
| No. total guesses | 190 |
| Links | |
| Puzzle | Link |
| Solution | Link |
Birds is an image identification puzzle from the Balloon Vendor round of the 2020 MIT Mystery Hunt.
Puzzle Elements[edit | edit source]
Image-Heavy - The whole puzzle is one image, though it could be better described as multiple images of birds.
Flavortext - In an open park, you see the balloon seller. They are surrounded by birds singing mellowly.
Identification (Zoology/Ornithology) - One must identify the bird images; the images are drawn from Audubon's Guide to North American Birds, which can be used as a source. (One of the birds, the Acadian Flycatcher, has a small Acadian flag, presumably to distinguish it from the highly-similarly-colored Cordilleran Flycatcher.)
Enumerations - The first set of numbers also enumerates the bird's binomial name...
Indexing - ...which can then be indexed into using the number in parentheses.
Keep Going! - The phrase obtained this way is "SOUTH BAY BIRD MNEMONIC PAGE", bringing solvers to this page. All birds in the puzzle are also in here.
Indexing - Each bird has a number of mnemonics composed of a number of syllables. The number before the colon indicates which mnemonic to draw a syllable from; the number after the colon indicates which syllable to take. The aforementioned Acadian Flycatcher, for example, has three mnemonics; take the second, "peet-suh", and extract its second syllable.
Sound It Out - The syllables can be sounded out into English words, using the spaces between groups of speech bubbles as word breaks and the white circles as syllable breaks.
Final Clue Phrase - The resulting phrase is LAMENTING VERSES PLAYED DURING A FUNERAL PROCESSION, which clues the final answer.
