To our favorable Lord, Doctori Martino Luthern, preacher at Wittenberg.
We thrushes, blackbirds, finches, linnets, goldfinches, along with other pious, respectable birds, who are to travel over Wittenberg this fall, add to your love's knowledge, as we are credibly reported, that one, named Wolfgang Sieberger, your servant, has taken the liberty of a great, unholy thurst, and out of great anger and hatred, has bought some old, spoiled nets over us at a high price, to create a flock of finches, and not only to deprive our dear friends and finches, but also all of us of the freedom to fly in the air and to read grains on earth, which God has given us, and to put us at risk for our life and limb, when we are not at all guilty of anything against him, nor do we deserve such a serious and swift thurst for him. Because all this, as you can consider yourselves, is an annual and great burden for us poor free birds (who have neither barns nor houses nor anything in them), we humbly and kindly ask you to send your servant away from such a thurst, or if that cannot be, to keep him so that he scatters grains on the stove for us the evening before and does not get up and go to the stove before eight o'clock in the morning, so we will take our train via Wittenberg.
If he will not do so, but will thus be wickedly after our lives, let us pray to God that he will punish him, and that he will feed frogs, grasshoppers and snails in our place during the day, and be covered with mice, fleas, lice and bugs at night, so that he will forget us and not prevent us from flying freely. Why does he not use such anger and seriousness against the sparrows, swallows, magpies, jackdaws, ravens, mice and rats, which do you much harm, steal and rob, and also carry off grain, oats, malt, barley, etc. from the houses, which we do not do, but only look for the small crumbs and individual ruined grains. We put such things to lawful reason, whether we are not unjustly pursued so hard by him; but we hope to God, because our brothers and friends stayed so much this autumn before him and escaped from him, we also want to escape from his loose and rotten nets, which we saw yesterday. Given in our heavenly seat under the trees, under our ordinary seal and feathers.
Look at the birds of the air: they do not sow, they do not reap, they do not gather into the sheds, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more than they? Matth. 6, 26.
*This joke by Luther is first found in the Eisleben edition, vol. II, p. 330; then in the Altenburg edition, vol. VI, p. 337; in the Leipzig edition, vol. XXII, p. 581, and in the Erlangen edition, vol. 64, p. 346.