Word: birde
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...minutes the birds stayed put. Then, in silent groups, they began to fly away. Along the sidewalks and on the lawns, people's mouths fell open, and murmurs rippled from group to group. In the middle of it all stood the bird man, dragging on a Roi-Tan cigar...
...Return. "Fraud," cried scientists. The bird man works at twilight, and that is when starlings go home to roost anyway. Also, the starlings were back next day. Very interesting, said the bird man, but these things take time. And had the scientists seen his credentials? In Indianapolis, for instance, where everything from klaxon horns to electric cords had been used to keep starlings from roosting at the U.S. courthouse and post office building, the bird man turned up last January. He spent a few hours on the courthouse roof, dangling what seemed to be a silver rope over the ledges...
...bird man has done it, too, in Des Moines, Wichita, Louisville, and his home town, Great Bend, Kans. His fees are staggered to protect the customer: the Indianapolis job was worth $2,500-half is paid, and half is still to come if the birds do not return. The Mount Vernon contract calls for $4,000 in three installments...
...knows just how much poison a starling can take without dying, sprinkles it around while diverting onlookers' attention with his noisy toys. Starlings would not want to go back for more. Perhaps the aluminum tube around his neck is just a long salt shaker full of poisonous bird seed...
Standke denies that he uses poison in his starling system, but admits he uses it on pigeons. Whether his secret is more closely related to biochemistry or to mumbo-jumbo, the bird man is in interesting company: the sixth labor of Hercules was to rid the Arcadian city of Stymphalus of its rasping birds. "When Hercules was at a loss how to drive the birds away," writes Apollodorus, "Athena gave him brazen castanets ... By clashing these, he scared the birds. They could not abide the sound...