Word: beaked
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Ideal Toy's new Smarty Bird, a battery-powered duck that walks about rolling its eyes and snapping its beak, alone will use up 600,000 Ibs. of plastics, 600 tons of steel, and enough corrugated cartons to cover 480 football fields. Chicago's Strombecker Corp. (midget racers, Tootsietoys) will consume more than 118 million tiny tires from Japan, and Los Angeles' Eldon Industries will use more than 300 tons of steel for the slender rails embedded in its plastic roadracing track...
...like a Log. There is no single best position for falling asleep, though the Encyclopaedia Britannica says all humankind adopts an approximately horizontal position. This is in contrast with birds, which sleep standing on one leg, with beak tucked under wing. Most people sleep on their sides, spending more time on one than the other, and tend to bend the hips and draw up the knees a little, the better to relax. Sleeping supine is likely to cause snoring, which may wake the sleeper himself, besides disturbing others...
...breed of albatross, common to the central Pacific, the gooney bird goes through a stately dance during courtship rites, punctuating his performance with mournful groans and metallic clackings of his beak...
...more he watched the clumsy, black-and-white wood stork as it fished in the muddy Florida swamp, the more vacationing Zoologist Marvin Philip Kahl Jr. was puzzled. As the big bird slogged awkwardly through the murky, weed-choked water, its long, curved beak dangling half open, it was hardly the picture of a successful predator. Yet it was snagging a fish every couple of seconds. How was it spotting its prey...
...turned loose in a shallow pool filled with minnows. The blinkered stork sloshed ahead, snapping up fish as quickly as its wide-eyed mate. Vision, the two zoologists explained in the British magazine Nature, has no part in the wood stork's fishing technique. The bird's beak is something like a repeating mouse trap, snapping shut on anything that touches it. If a fish so much as brushes against either of the bird's mandibles, the beak closes in as little as nineteen-thousandths of a second. By contrast, the human eye takes forty-thousandths...