Word: auk
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...lying exhausted in their streets some black & white, thick-beaked birds they had never seen before. Not since 1908 had such a bird appeared in the city, and it had arrived on shipboard. Most finders promptly called or hurried to the Bronx Zoo, learned the fallen strangers were little auks, cousins of the least auklet and the extinct great auk. Winging southward from their Arctic loomeries,they had been blown inland by a 65-m. p. h. gale...
...last storm-tossed shower was at Boston in 1871. Only 20 recorded times in the past 40 years has the bird been found inland. Looking somewhat like a dove-sized penguin, the little auk is helpless on land. It feeds chiefly on a type of water bug found only at sea, needs the impetus of a wave to get into the air. Of nearly 100 picked up in New York's metropolitan area last week, only four survived...
...same storms that blew little auks into New York killed thousands elsewhere along the Atlantic Coast. The Eskimos of Greenland. Spitsbergen and Franz Josef Land may well miss them, for the little auk is a staple of their food supply, "Eskimo lollipops" as Curator Robert Cushman Murphy of the American Museum of Natural History calls them. In Greenland the Eskimos will beg the Goddess Nivikkaa, sitting at the bottom of the sea, to lift her lamp and let the little auks come up again...
...which Sportsman Whitney left $750,000 and New York City added an equal amount. Many of the birds will eventually be mounted for public display, but most will be available and of interest only to scientists. Lord Rothschild specialized in rare and disappearing species, got among others a great auk, two Labrador ducks, a series of passenger pigeons and Guadalupe caracaras. Other groups: birds of paradise, Hawaiian honey-creepers, Old World sun-birds, 6,000 American humming birds. Added to its present strength in birds of the Americas and the Pacific (many of them gathered by Whitney-sponsored expeditions...
...years ago he took in hand a list of 100 words that should be recognized by this hypothetical person, and administered it to his students year after year. The students had to use each word in a sentence, and brilliant examples would come in, like this: p>"The great auk is now extinct...