brid’s the wrod?

Well perhaps this is a really old pot. A much older form of bird in English was brid sometimes bryd.
From the OED

Etymology: Middle English byrd, bryd< Old English brid(masculine) (plural briddas), in Northumbrian bird, birdas ‘offspring, young,’ but used only of the young of birds. There is no corresponding form in any other Germanic language, and the etymology is unknown.

The vowel <i> and the liquid <r> have undergone a process known as metathesis – the swapping of places of sounds within a word (though note speakers of NZE subsequently do not pronounce the <r> when it follows a vowel and is itself not followed by another vowel). Most often seen as a phonological process which results in change over time, a few languages use metathesis for grammatical purposes. Sierra Miwok, a severely endangered language of California uses this process to derive nouns:

Base	Derived form
kalaŋ ‘to dance’	kalŋa ‘a dance’
ʔumuʧ ‘to approach winter’	ʔumʧu ‘winter’
tuyaŋ ‘to jump’	tuyŋa ‘a jump’
ʔawin ‘to play’	ʔawni ‘a game’

(data from Stonham, J. 2006, p.93).

Have a look at the sequence of vowel and consonant at the ends of the Miwok pairs.  ‘To dance ends with the vowel /a/ followed by  the consonant sound which is the final sound in English ‘sing’. In the noun form, meaning ‘a dance’, the consonant and vowel has swapped places. This swapping can be seen in all the pairs. So we can say in Sierra Miwok, metathesis is a way of making meaning.