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A popular started out as a joke at least as far back as the 1940s, one which played on the stereotype of the backwards, rural farmer as too unsophisticated to recognize the significance of a banded bird, too unschooled to interpret the designation on its band as anything but cooking instructions, and too poor to let something he'd killed go to waste by not eating it: In one early telling, the angry note sent to the government came from an Alberta farmer, not an Arkansas camper: By attributing the 1998 Internet version to Knight-Ridder, someone passed off a decades-old joke as a recent news item, prompting Smithsonian magazine to take a look at the venerable legend. According to their findings, the story may have begun back in the 1920s, when the government used a batch of bands on which the abbreviation Biol. was misspelled as Boil: Although it doesn't involve animals, an anecdote related in a book about the 1986 New York Mets baseball team somewhat echoes this legend:
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