When eccentric scientist Papa Schimmelhorn plays his seemingly harmless bassoon, a wave of material-eating Gnurrs are summoned by the millions. He uses them to end the war against Bobovia.

A young girl obsessed with birdsong and other music finds a witch who helps her become a powerful and magical musician presiding over a remote coastal village. She becomes dissatisfied with the limits of her powers and decides to seek more.

A commonplace English village begins to observe the offbeat behavior of Magpies which becomes increasingly more disquieting.

After a wealthy consultant asks a local bird-hunting legend for shooting lessons, the hunter soon comes to regret agreeing to teach him and tricks him into ending his tutelage.

A young lute player is aided by a harmonizing spider who resides in her lute, unbeknownst to her. Though the spider becomes attached to the lute player, she continues to feel loneliness and longing for her home among other spiders in the forest of her birth.

On a rainy day at school, a man with a voice that sounds like "beginnings" interrupts a singing lesson led by a schoolteacher with a "disappearing" voice.

In the far future, a woman is selected to undergo a Great Becoming. As she is forced to choose what she will become, she realizes that someone people do not have to choose at all.

A modern Puerto Rican parrot meditates on why humans seek intelligence in other corners of the universe while they neglect the refined communicative capacities of their neighboring parrots.

When seeds fall from the sky and cause human beings to transform into animals, two people try to understand how they met.

Assuming that they were here to invade, mankind massacred the aliens whose ships landed on Earth. Now, the aliens and humans have an uneasy peace together. The aliens who landed on earth love to fly kites. One kite-maker sells them despite harassment from skinheads who hate the aliens and anyone who does business with them.