This is the legend of 七夕 (Qi Xi), as told to me by my grandfather:

Once upon a time, in a long ago era, there was a beautiful young lady who was the daughter of the Empress of Heaven. Her name was 织女 (Zhi Nu), which meant Weaver Girl. Her job was to weave together colorful clouds.

One day, Zhi Nu descended to Earth so she could bathe in one of its beautiful lakes. 牛郎 (Niu Lang), a young man whose name meant "cowherd," spotted her bathing naked. He fell in love with her. And although she was quite alarmed at first, she fell in love with him, for he was handsome and strong. Without telling her mother, she decided to marry him. They lived a simple life on Earth, she weaving textiles and he tending to his cattle. They had two children.

The Empress, being the powerful woman that she was, discovered this before long. She was extremely irate, since her beloved immortal daughter had married a mere mortal. She angrily separated the two, forcing her daughter Zhi Nu to remain in heaven.

However, Zhi Nu pined so much for her beloved Niu Lang that all the birds of the world began to take notice of her pain and suffering. They decided that on one day of every year, they would help the lovestruck couple meet again. Thus, on the seventh day of the seventh month of the lunar calendar, all the birds in the world fly up to form a bridge between heaven and earth, and Zhi Nu and Niu Lang walk this bridge to meet each other again in the middle.

This is the story of the Chinese version of Valentine's Day.
This is the love story of 牛郎和织女, the story of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl.
_{Read the wikipedia version here.}

That is how I remember the tale that my grandfather told me. It seems to be different from everyone else's version, but I prefer it, simply because I find the notion that all the birds in the world will help this couple more romantic than the orthodox global magpie population flocking to the skies.

As for the birds in this picture, as far as I know, every one of them is actually an existing species. However, I cannot name all of them. I just know that I've seen them all before. Hopefully you can differentiate the minute differences between the more similar birds and recognize the more common birds.

_{this is the cleaned up full version of the =Birds-Club devID.}