Word: curlew
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...curlew, cry no more...
...explorers found in Tahiti an odd, crow-sized bird with a flute-like cry. It was named the bristle-thighed curlew,* Numenius tahitiensis...
Ever since, ornithologists have wondered where the bristle-thighed curlew really lives and does its reproducing. It winters in the South Seas, as many New Yorkers winter in Florida, but it does not make its nest there. In 1869, a bristle-thighed curlew was spotted on the Alaska coast. But no nest was found. Apparently the curlews, having flown over 5,000 miles from Tahiti, penetrated still farther into Alaska to raise their families...
Some three weeks ago a well-heeled expedition, sponsored by the National Geographic Society, Cornell University and the Arctic Institute of North America and equipped with airplanes, motion picture cameras and other up-to-date gadgets, made a serious attack on the curlew's domestic privacy. Last week the exciting news was flashed to Dr. Gilbert Grosvenor, president of the National Geographic Society, from Dr. Arthur A. Allen, head of the expedition: "We have found the curlew's nest." It was at 62° north latitude, 164° west longitude, near Mountain Village on the lower Yukon...
...rare footnote that doesn't produce some interesting and unexpected result. For instance, Managing Editor T. S. Matthews dropped a footnote - definitely on the learned side - from a Science story about the chimney swift. The footnote was a stanza from a poem about a curlew, by W. B. Yeats. A researcher who was dispatched to the public library to find and check the verse, being in no mood to go through all of Yeats' works, finally telephoned the English department of Columbia University and asked for their expert on Yeats. He was at home, preparing a bottle...