Word: birde
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...While bird lovers admire grackles for their iridescent feathers and canny ability to mimic human voices, for others they're a nuisance - dirty, noisy and a plague that has prompted cities and institutions across the country to declare war on the black clouds that roost in trees throughout the southern U.S. So when the black birds turned up dead, suspicions about a possible culprit exposed divisions that run deep across the country between the pro- and anti-grackle camps...
...morning on Jan. 8, three Austin policemen on patrol downtown found the dead birds feet up on Congress Avenue, the city's busy main boulevard. With ever-present concerns about bird flu and terrorism, HAZMAT teams, the fire and police departments, the county health department, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Texas National Guard's rapid response team and even the FBI were quickly on scene as the city closed off downtown...
...Common grackles, as they are known, are just that - common, especially in the fall and winter when southern birds move into the urban areas and northern birds fly south in great flocks of thousands. Google "grackle" and you will find birding sites that describe them as "opportunistic foragers" and "boisterous and abundant." For every rhapsodic bird lover, there is someone like director Michael Berry, whose successful short film Day of the Grackle, depicts one man's war with a grackle from hell...
...with lots of transfer of power from the nation states to the center is complete head-in-the-sand. The French and the Dutch voted no. This constitution is dead. It doesn't matter how hard you try to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation - to mix my metaphors - this bird is not going to fly. So the Conservative Party is in a rather strong position. I was just reading the papers this morning - the government is in rather an awkward position because Blair said a number of things, and [his presumed successor, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon] Brown. They...
...Hepburn women were often women apart, like the Green Mansions Bird Girl, quarantined in her aviary. Race was the improbable barrier in The Unforgiven, where she got a great tan to play Burt Lancaster's "l'il red-hide Injun," the pretty pelt in a sociological showdown...