Word: birde
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Southpaw Puleston works from his own freehand sketches and color notes, and consults museum bird skins (stuffed but unmounted) . Each delicately brushed watercolor takes 15 to 20 hours. "When I'm going full blast every free evening," says Puleston, "I can finish a painting in about a week." Last week Puleston laid aside his brushes and took up binoculars to join in the annual splurge of Christmas bird counting reported in SPORT. He was one of a Viking-blooded group which chartered a fishing boat to cruise the Atlantic off Long Island and New Jersey, prepared to brave arctic...
...robust, the plot consistently thins: from the rivalry of the bordello madams emerge no comic explosions, nor any satiric didoes from the gentility of the girls. In the second half, House of Flowers craves a sea breeze to dispel its island languor, a human note for its doll-like, bird-like world...
...Thorough bush, thorough brier/Over park, over pale,/Thorough flood, thorough fire . . ." in pursuit of their quarry. When the chase was over, the hunters had no trophies to show, for they did their hunting with nothing more deadly than binoculars and telescopes. They were devotees of the flourishing sport of bird watching, and last week, with its annual counts for the National Audubon Society, was their World Series...
Vanishing Breeds. When the first count was run on Christmas Day in 1900, birds were getting scarcer in the U.S. The great auk and Labrador duck were gone; the umbrageous flocks of passenger pigeons were reduced to a pathetic aviary remnant; the trumpeter swan seemed likely to be silenced forever. Then came bird-protection laws and treaties. Although these are still not fully enforced, nearly all the once-threatened birds have come back, some in greater numbers than ever before. Birders, as bird watchers call themselves, have multiplied with the birds. Only a handful of the watchers are professional ornithologists...
...claims of what they have seen, birders work on the honor system. Two together must agree on identification. Small and manageable numbers of birds must be counted precisely; huge flocks can only be estimated. (Birders train themselves to do this with reasonable accuracy by throwing a handful of rice onto a dark tabletop, estimating the number of grains with one glance, then checking their estimate by careful count.) Artificial aids to attract birds and flush them from the underbrush are legitimate. Many birders make a succession of noises such as "Pshhh, pshhh, pshhh; psi, psi, psi; tsk, tsk, tsk." Birding...