"Very Odd?"

No.

quoth perldoc perlpod, qv:

"=encoding *encodingname*"
This command is used for declaring the encoding of a document. Most users won't need this; but if your encoding isn't US-ASCII or Latin-1, then put a "=encoding *encodingname*" command early in the document so that pod formatters will know how to decode the document. For *encodingname*, use a name recognized by the Encode::Supported module. Examples:

• =encoding utf8
• =encoding koi8-r
• =encoding ShiftJIS

....