As functional programmers, we like to piece our programs together out of small pieces. Our main tool for this is composition. We take an input, process it through a function, then pass it on to another function. And this all works great so long as all our functions take exactly one argument. Which never happens. So what do we do? In general, we turn to a set of tools called combinators. This article focusses on a particular combinator called the blackbird.