Word: barkings
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Before the smoke and soot from the burning coal and wood of the Industrial Revolution began to blacken the bark of England's trees, the predominant variety of peppered moth had light-colored, speckled wings that blended perfectly with lichen-covered tree bark and camouflaged the insects against predatory birds. A mutant form of the moth, with black wings, was easily spotted against the light-colored tree bark, picked off and eaten. The surviving black moths were so rare, in fact, that the first one was not captured until...
...tree trunks grew progressively blacker, however, it became easier for birds to see and prey upon the speckled variety of the peppered moth. The once-vulnerable black moth, becoming indistinguishable against the darkening bark, found it easier to survive and multiply. By 1900, black peppered moths outnumbered the speckled variety by 99 to 1. Between 1952 and 1964, in a continuing survey made near one industrial town, not a single speckled moth was found. Eventually, this example of evolutionary forces at work became standard fare in college biology courses, illustrating the adaptability of organisms to a changing environment...
...secret of his paint-mixing techniques with the public by publishing instructions and recipe booklets: "Dissolve half a pound of glue in a gallon of water, and with this sizing mix whatever colors may be required for the work." Foliage could be stippled on with corks and sponges; bark was suggested by "giving a tremulous motion to the brush...
...bungled." A lifelong slave of words and reasons, he envies the intensity with which Mandy perceives the world nonverbally through her four acute senses. Fascinated by attentiveness for its own sake, he frees himself for a time by tasting and testing along with her. Ink tastes like "charred toenail," bark is like vulcanized crab meat, and leather, "a taste here not of the meat or the fat next to the hide but of the fur once outside it and of seaweed iodine...
...Imagine Armco." Potlatch Forests, Inc., a lumber company, has ads with scenes of forests and wildlife. One shows a sparkling, pine-flanked waterway over the headline: "It cost us a bundle, but the Clearwater River still runs clear." The message: Potlatch installed a filter plant to remove wood and bark deposited in the river by its Idaho logging operations...