Word: audubons
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...bird-loving National Audubon Society began its week with happiness; one of its prospectors had discovered a large flock of flamingos in Yucatan. A few days later, the happiness turned to ecstasy when gladder news arrived from Texas. At Aransas National Wildlife Refuge near Corpus Christi, the message said, a precious egg had been hatched. From it had stepped a baby whooping crane, the first ever born in captivity. Thus, according to the most respected count, there were 38, not 37, survivors of the once numerous breed of whooping cranes...
Soon there were cries of anguish from U.S. bird lovers. The violent, aggressive English sparrows were too successful. Wherever the sparrows came, bluebirds and wrens got out. Audubon Society members reported heartrending sights of native birds being pursued, insulted and pecked by sparrows...
Inverse Commuters. The aroused Audubon Society, a dangerous adversary, considered the English sparrow Bird Enemy No. 1, outranking the feral cat and the small boy with an air rifle. Pamphlets blackened the sparrow's name. Said Biologist Ned Dearborn of the U.S. Biological Survey: "The English sparrow among birds, like the rat among mammals, is cunning, destructive and filthy...
...sparrow hosts were already declining, anyhow; the early years of the century had been their Golden Age. Their downfall was not the Audubon Society, but the automobile. As horses grew scarcer & scarcer, sparrows grew scarcer too. Now they survive in cities mostly on the leavings of pigeons...
...phony air of spring about it, as if it were a sudden incarnation of illustrations from a seed catalogue. The spring feeling was partly due to the chirps and warblings which permeated one part of building. We found that these were emanating from a booth occupied by the Massachusetts Audubon Society, where a saleslady was giving a sample playing of some bird song records. They were on vinylite and sounded authentic. Besides the bird records, the Audubon Society was selling books on birds, paper weights in the from of birds, bird boxes, wallpaper with birds on it, and an album...