The Defense Department announced that our ever-vigilant military managed to intercept and shoot down a seagull over the Pacific. To assure a successful outcome, Dick Cheney was invited to observe the launch of the interceptor missile, as long as he brought along his quail gun to act as a backup to the missile.

The seagull reportedly crashed into the sea, and there are so far no reports from whales or other sea creatures of the shredded bird or debris from the intercepting missile crashing onto their unsuspecting backs.

The Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency admitted that shooting down a seagull isnt quite as accomplished or reassuring as blasting a dummy missile in flight, but it cautioned that the gull intercept was only intended as an exercise of an improved ground-based interceptor system.

The $85 million effort was primarily designed to collect data about flying feathers, rather than to shoot down an actual missile.

The test firing is the first one to involve a live target since interceptor rockets failed to leave their silos during tests in 2004 and 2005, designed to startle an overabundant population of pigeons.

The nascent system is designed to protect the US against a limited attack by a variety of flying objects.

Earlier in the week, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Sunday that he wanted to have a full-scale test "where we actually put all the pieces together. That just hasn't happened."

He might more exactly have stated, where we blow all the pieces apart.

Ornithologists were on hand to protest and, when the seagull exploded into a feather fan, they dropped their binoculars and let out a sigh that frightened into flight a pelican that was dozing on a proximate post.