I agree with Thomas.
I think that discarding old RHEL init.d (upstart) support is a hasty decision: bird is for production systems and linux distro for production environment which uses RPM packages is RHEL or it clones (mostly).
Although it is no matter for me because I'm not using bird rpm package provided by developers. I'm rebuilding it from src.rpm with bgp summary patch (by the way, does a honorable developers plans to implement 'bgp summary' command in vanilla bird?) and my initscript patch.