Word: birding
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...Great Austin Grackle Kill of '07 had all sides engaged. Had the birds, which number in the thousands in downtown Austin, been poisoned by some angry loft developer? Or had they died from a bout of overindulgence of mistletoe during the holidays? The answer to both is no, according to experts at Texas A&M University. They say the grackles fell prey to parasites and a sudden dip in temperatures, struck down by a double whammy of bad luck in the bird world...
...Given bird flu fears and pure aesthetics, no one wants to see flocks of shiny black birds stiff on the sidewalk. But weakened birds will continue to die when temperatures dip and, if they land on a busy downtown boulevard, even in a city like Austin where bird lovers abound, they will spark yet another debate in the war on grackles that is being waged across the country and the methods being used to curb the grackle population. In order to discourage roosting, city administrators in Tempe, Ariz., tried lathering their downtown trees with a concord grape coating that made...
...Austin's upscale grocery store, Central Market, beams out recordings of predatory bird screeches. But the city of San Antonio is considering going one step further, hiring California-based Ronin Air Falconry Services, to send African Augur hawks and Faker falcons into the skies over the city's popular Riverwalk area. The plan is that the predator birds will scare the grackle flocks away from the tourists, allowing them to focus on margaritas, not Mother Nature...
...course, are the dark characters Hall employs to keep Mrs. Shoddy's sanity at bay (most memorable of all, there's a big black bull that materializes from the fog). But as in the Robert Graves poem from which the novel takes its name ("? as when the young bird-catcher/ Swept off his tall hat to the Squire's daughter,/ So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly"), Hall's dark vision is lit by a transforming lyricism, with bravura passages that can take the breath away. This is Australian writing worth caring about...
From his seat in the tactical operations center, Army Lieutenant Colonel Edward Taylor can survey a wall-sized black-and-white satellite map of Baghdad. But that bird's-eye view will probably matter less than the two books on the table in front of him, as U.S. troops once again attempt to bring the city under control...