When you look up at the sky and see the clouds, don’t you wonder about what it would be like to fly? Fly past all your worries on the surface and just jump right to A-Site, avoiding all the hassle of stealthily making your way to plant a bomb?

No? Maybe that’s just Valve’s CS:GO design team. In 2014, when Valve released their Train rework, they unintentionally introduced a funny bug. Or bird, as the case may be. Birds have a long and proud history in Counter-Strike, with appearances dating all the way back to the original Counter-Strike’s Italy map. Granted most of Counter-Strike’s famous birds have been Chickens, but with the Train rework, a forgetful Valve programmer accidentally let another bird take center stage.

Namely, they let a simple pigeon become the most important bird in Counter-Strike for a brief moment.

What happened?

In December 2014, Valve reworked CS:GO’s Train map, updated its graphics and changed both bombsites as well as the areas in between. This 2014 rework is actually the same Train we play on today just with one major difference. When it came out, you could ride on the pigeons next to the T-side spawnpoint.

T-side players who wanted a bit of a break from all that running they were doing during the match could take a little break by hopping on top of a pigeon and riding it to wherever the winds took it. Or A-Site. Because the pigeon flew towards A-Site and hey, you’ll take whatever gift a pigeon gives you.

Essentially, a Valve programmer forgot to program the birds as intangible background items, and instead made them interactive. Think of these pigeons more as moving crates than birds.

WTF?

Believe it or not, it turns out that getting a boost to A-Site without having to do anything is kind of crazy. To be fair, it wasn’t exactly a one-way ticket to the bombsite for the whole team. Instead, one T-side player had to run all the way down the long route to the bombsite, hop on a pigeon and grab a lift into the level’s upper geometry. Then, they had to hop along the geometry to reach an otherwise inaccessible rooftop overlooking A-Site.

Not only was this an insane way to get the jump on your unsuspecting CT-side opponents, you were also far harder to hit. You had a spectacular angle for sniping, throwing grenades, or even just spraying an AK-47 clip to provide suppressing fire for your allies on the ground. Meanwhile, you were so high up and far away that enemies were pretty unlikely to hit you without bringing their AWPer on to the point to sit out in the open to get a bead on you.

Alternatively you could just ride the pigeon into the heavens forever, past the boundaries of the map, past the battle blow, past the eternal conflict between terrorists and counter-terrorists.

What happened?

Valve tends to react very quickly when something is broken, so the bird boost didn’t last too long. In fact, it took one day for Valve to patch some intangibility into T-side’s feathered friends so they couldn’t be used for a trip to the heavens/A-Site.

But, Valve won’t let a good meme die unnoticed. To commemorate the funniest glitch CS:GO ever had, they put a little sign on the map right where you used to be able to get a pigeon to pick you up and give you a lift to the objective.

The sign, in Russian, says “Do Not Step on the Birds”. So please, try to avoid any foul behavior around the pigeons. They’ve done so much for us.