Word: birde
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Like its U.S. cousin, the chickadee, Britain's tit has been taught to relish the meat of coconuts hung on a garden tree.) One Times reader, the bird-loving Countess of Cawdor, took a more ominous view of the matter. "Could it be," she mused darkly, "that it is we ourselves whose mad behavior has affected the tits...
Anyone who wanders down a U.S. country road this winter may be startled at the sight of a great white bird drifting close on five-foot silent wings. The bird's head is as big as a grapefruit, its yellow eyes glitter balefully. But there is no cause for alarm: it is only a displaced snowy owl (Nyctea scandiaca), a refugee from a lemming shortage in Canada...
Last week, Audubon Society members had completed scores of bird counts which proved that the U.S. will have a booming owl winter. From Arctic Canada had come reports that lemmings, the mouselike rodents which are the favorite food of snowy owls, are critically scarce. In years of plenty, when Arctic vegetation is growing vigorously, the lemming population builds up until the barren lands are alive with lemmings. The owls increase too. Well-fed with lemmings, they lay and hatch clutches of ten eggs or more...
...Government buildings, and swooped down to feed on the bothersome starlings. Five of the interlopers landed at Detroit's Willow Run commercial airport, were shot from the ILS poles because airmen feared they would throw the electronic landing beam off its bearing. Dr. George Miksch Sutton, ornithologist and bird painter of the University of Michigan, who had predicted this year's invasion, says that by late February the surviving owls will be heading back to lemming land...