This is clearly just a limited hangout so they can say "look at how crude our taxidermy robots are! This totally proves birds are real!"
The government wants you to believe they aren't capable of creating the omnipresent surveillance network that are so-called "birds". We've been under this surveillance since the early 60s when the government avian extermination program was in full swing. Why else do you think they were so gung-ho about DDT? It helped provide smokescreen for the avian replacement system experiment. Wake up, Birds Aren't Real
But if you read the avain replacement system experiment paper you would have seen it was of limited success. Sure pigeons and starlings are no longer real, but those were the only 2 successfully replaced species.
You forget that paper is from the mid-80s. I don't understand why people think they just stopped replacing birds. The authors of that paper based it all on declassified documents that were almost 30 years old even then! If anything the government just got better at hiding what they were doing, mark my words in another couple decades it'll come out that it's not only the pigeons and starlings that have been replaced but also robins, seagulls, and a variety songbirds!
IIRC the issue with waterfowl conversion was sudden failure of seals, buoyancy and ballast systems.
The seagull program was hit with the extra problems of salt water
Last leak mentioned the advances have made in the house sparrow model, but battery life is still an issue.
Songbirds aren't used due to birdwatchers; as outlined in the paper "Avain surveillance: security, counter surveillance, and camouflage" read the updated 2019 version.