Guy Fawkes, the young princes and Anne Boleyn were all famously locked up in the Tower of London but now it's the turn of the ravens to be incarcerated. The fabled residents - legend has it the tower will crumble and the kingdom fall if the ravens leave - have been caged as their keepers, in common with bird owners around Britain, prepare against the seemingly inexorable spread of bird flu.
The Tower ravens - named Branwen, Hugine, Munin, Gwyllum, Thor and Baldrick - are said by the raven master, Derrick Coyle, to be getting used to their new surroundings.
"Although we don't like having to bring the Tower ravens inside, we believe it is the safest thing to do for their own protection, given the speed that the virus is moving across Europe," he told the BBC.
With the government warning that commercial bird owners should be preparing to bring their poultry in doors in the event of a bird flu discovery in Britain, many amateur keepers are also planning how to bunker down their "ladies".
The suggestion on the Omlet forum (registration required) is that Ikea shower curtains make excellent roofs for people trying to turn their backyards into a covered environment that conforms to Defra standards. The idea is to prevent poultry from mixing with fallen wild bird droppings which could be infected with avian flu. Clare has posted some photos of the run she has made for her bantams (Ruby, Sadie, Layla, Dolly and Lavinia).
Despite the gloomy headlines, there's a feeling that backyard poultry can be reasonably well protected and a general stoicism that bird flu will not be as bad as has been predicted in some media nightmare scenarios.
Over at the Poultry Forum, there's plenty of banter on making sure your birds don't get bored while interned.
Like other animals, they need to be kept entertained but, as Jooles points out, some games can become dangerous:
"I have a few branches suspended in my run and they are often sitting on them, all squashed up together. I had to stop them swinging, though, because when one chook jumped off, all the others would fall off as the branch swung wildly about."
TheMan, at Practical Poultry Magazine, is finding the issue of bringing chickens indoors conceptually challenging.
"I have thought a lot about this over the past few days - about new hen houses and covered sheds etc, but reluctantly I do not think it is for me. A free-range chicken farmer more or less summed it up for me when he declared today that he could not change his philosophy' and would cull his flock rather than bring them indoors," he writes.
Yesterday's call by the leading Dutch virologist Albert Osterhaus that Britain should bring indoors or vaccinate all poultry has not convinced Mike Meredith. He believes a shamanistic approach to animal disease epidemics warrants further consideration.
"In many parts of the world, waterfowl populations have been getting out of balance for some years now - populations too crowded - with consequent pollution (thereby lowering their disease resistance) of lakes and waterways. This is a situation just asking for a disease epidemic!"
Meanwhile, it appears that French farmers affected following the discovery of an infected duck have turned to what Reuters calls "gallows humour" in an attempt to deal with bird flu. It is, however, questionable whether the joke is gallows humour or poor taste.
