The Empire of the Birds have an ancient, advanced, and highly structured civilization.
The Birds are so secretive that they have lost their own history and origin story. They do not actually know where they come from, or anything about their past. Of course, they don’t want anyone to know that they don’t know who they are so they hide who they are from everyone else. Their claim of descent from Avian forebears cannot be confirmed either through archaeological evidence or genetic testing, but appears likely to those few researchers with the opportunity to fully study the available evidence.
The biggest secret of them all, unknown even to most Bird people, is that the Bird inner sanctum possesses an encrypted historical databank which might tell them who they are. However, access to this database was so carefully guarded that, over the eons, it was completely lost to history. Their race was guided then to travel the stars seeking technology to unlock their own origin story, in part to provide meaning to themselves.
The Bird fleet is not as powerful as some, but they make up for it in sneakiness. The majority of their war fleet is equipped with cloaking devices, including the only cloaking battleship in the Echo Cluster: the Dark Wing. This grants them a degree of tactical superiority due to the Priority Intercept Attack, especially as they are both immune to Lokis and can construct a few starships equipped with Advanced Cloaking Devices, which can be used to evade even the effects of ion storms.
Bird ships are very good at spying on enemy planets. They can use their Super Spy mission to get a secret report that contains the enemy's planetary Friendly Code. They can also sometimes change these Friendly Codes in order to gain economic, logistical, or even tactical advantage.
Key Race advantages: