Word: birde
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Like other U.S. cities, Brooklyn in those days was plagued by bugs. The shy and decorative native birds did not like city life. As U.S. cities expanded, the birds retired to rural refuges, leaving the shade trees and flower gardens defenseless against insects. Officials of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences discussed the problem at length, finally sent to England for an urban bird: the English sparrow...
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...
...recent years, the pilgrim has become a rare bird of passage in Christendom. The Roman Catholic Holy Year is swelling the pilgrim flock by the millions, but most of them will dispense with cowl and staff, danger and dust, and have a fairly comfortable time. To learn what such journeys once involved, pilgrims and non-pilgrims can turn to Friar Felix at Large, by British Novelist H.F.M. Prescott. It is based largely on the 15th Century's 1,500-page Fratris Felicis Fabri Evagatorium in Terrae Sanctae, perhaps the best account ever given of the pilgrimage to Jerusalem...
...just about equaled the baseball attendance at Yankee Stadium, Natural History pays its own $200,000-a-year way. This week, to celebrate its golden anniversary, Museum President F. Trubee Davison invited 100 top publishers and scientists to lunch amid the albatrosses and petrels in the hall of Oceanic Bird Life, and presented a medal for "faithfulness to natural law" to Amateur Naturalist Hoover...