by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Go into any warehouse-type store and you might get a glimpse of nature that mom'n'pop family-run businesses could never offer. Look upwards and chances are you'll see a house sparrow or two swooping gleefully around among the rafters. These flying deviants infiltrate through the big delivery doors of such stores as Ikea, Wal-Mart and Club Price and thrive in their new homes.

"They can live quite happily in there. They have plenty of space to fly and they're free of predators," according to local bird expert David Bird.

And big box birds even have keys. "House sparrows living inside an airport in New Zealand discovered that if they flew in front of the electric eye, the doors would open. They learned to open the doors to get access to food left on tables," says Bird. "Warehouse stores probably don't want to host animals but I don't think birds do any harm. I wouldn't be happy to learn that they were trying to poison them."

What, then, do stores do with birds? The stores I called sent me down a telephonic maze where every human voice suggests you call a different department until you reach one that never calls back.

But according to those in the exterminator loop, your favourite big store waits until the doors are closed before sentencing the birds to death for aerial trespassing. The demise of our fine-feathered friends is not pretty. The sparrows munch a drug called Avitrol, an avian hallucinogen that causes the birds to fly into walls until dead. The drug is a danger to the food chain, and Health Canada has issued warnings to stay away from birds suspected of dying of such a fate.

I'm sad that such noble, amiable and inventive creatures could be treated so cruelly. If society can be judged by the way it treats its cutest, cuddliest members, then we have a lot to answer for.

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Another topic that needs to be addressed without delay is the Montreal connection to penis panic. This psychological affliction, known to experts as koro, dates back to at least 300 BC in China. Victims believe that some malevolent force (a witch, ex-girlfriend etc.) is causing their penises to retract into their bodies. Once word gets out, others think they have the same problem and mass panic erupts, as displayed in - among others - koro epidemics in Singapore in 1967, Thailand 1976, West Bengal 1982 and Nigeria in 1990.

One would think that a cold country like Canada would be plagued with this problem because penises - unlike nipples, which get deliciously erect - tend to shrink in cold weather.

In fact, Canadian men appear to be immune from the fear that our penises are disappearing. However, our humble island has produced its own variation of penis panic that, after 118 years, remains debated among scientists.

Credit Sir William Osler, who taught at McGill from 1875 to 1884. Osler - a sawbones so famous that somebody wrote a 1,400-page biography of the guy - was the first to describe penis captivus. That, you surely know, is when the penis gets stuck inside the vagina.

In 1884, the 35-year-old Montrealer submitted an article to the Philadelphia Medical News under the fake name of Egerton Y. Davis. He described a scenario in which "his penis was tightly locked in her vagina, and any attempt to dislodge it was accompanied by much pain on the part of both." The doctor in the story solves the problem by knocking the woman out with chloroform.

Osler's letter was pure pranksterism, but scientists referred to the case for decades. And many scientists still suggest the threat of losing your penis inside a woman, at least temporarily, is real. Even myth debunker www.snopes.com considers the inconvenient phenomenon as "extremely unlikely" but refuses to dismiss the existence of the Montreal penis-jam. Perhaps the unspoken history of this city contains a silent epidemic of penis captivus among the corseted classes too polite to come forward.

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