Word: birding
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Wherever it shifted, the oil brought ecological disaster to bird and sea life. At Santa Barbara's three treatment centers, 1,400 sea-diving birds had been brought in. Only a third survived. Other shoreline birds, such as curlews, plovers and willets, which feed on sand creatures, had fled the area...
...practically devoid of plankton, which nourishes such underwater creatures as limpets and winkles. By contrast, when the slick floated to the coast of Brittany, the French insisted that toxic detergents should not be used. Scooping up the oil was slower, but less destructive to sea life. However, the bird population has never recovered from the oil. The rare puffin, which nests in the Channel islands, has almost ceased to exist...
Stand-by Alert. On the surface, it hardly seems to matter. Along Avenida Rio Branco in Rio de Janeiro large stylized figures decorate the curbs, bird cages in their outstretched hands. Huge, brightly colored sunflowers float above the traffic amid a profusion of plastic hummingbirds, cardinals and canaries. "Mother's Heart," an outsized paddy wagon so named "because there is always room for one more," is on standby alert-although the cops will haul away only the rowdiest of cariocas...
People who spring from bed clear-eyed and cheerful tend to think the early bird really does catch the worm. Slugabeds grumble that the sunny risers are worms themselves. For Ben Franklin and puritanical believers in his maxims, to be earlier than thou is virtually to be holier. But early-morning surly birds dispute them. After all, no less an American culture hero than Robert Frost milked his cows at midnight because he could not be bothered to get up and do it at sunrise. These days, researchers are slowly waking up to waking...
...What kind of tale can possibly evolve from such a gallimaufry of trivia? A dreamer on a park bench, a dim-witted bird fancier, a dead cat, an eight-year-old boy, a picture dealer, a handful of pigeons and an insurance agent-hardly the cast of War and Peace, I must agree." So speaks the witty but slightly (?) deranged narrator, park-bench dreamer, master painter and hero (?) of this fantastical and compelling first novel. The unlikely tale that does evolve draws the unwitting narrator into a plot to palm off one of his works as a Leonardo da Vinci...