Word: curlew
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...Allen, 78, Cornell University ornithologist who in 50 years of bird watching discovered many principles of avian psychology (birds are shocked to see themselves in mirrors, sometimes suffer from inferiority complexes), was the first to raise the ruffed grouse in captivity, locate the nesting place of the bristle-thighed curlew, record successfully the call of the whooping crane; of a heart attack; in Ithaca...
...boys are dazzled with the glory of war: "You don't think it will end before we're old enough to get in it, do you?" When the school starts up an army cadet corps, with uniforms and rifles, they are ecstatic. In his daydreams, young John Curlew shoots down a squadron of Nazis in his plane, cleans out a machine-gun nest with a single grenade, gets the Victoria Cross from Winston Churchill, and wins the adulation of the rest of the gang. In reality the other boys despise him for his friendship with Mark Stein...
...airplanes, trains, barking dogs and high winds, he has triumphantly recorded the moorland cry of the greenshank and the "singing" of the seal on the spray-splashed rocks off the Pembrokeshire coast. He is postponing his retirement at least until he can get on wax the elusive stone curlew and the long-tailed...
Some footnotes are indestructible-at least, one of ours seems to be. It was dropped from a sober Science story about the bristle-thighed curlew in TIME's June 28, 1948 issue, and it read...
...there, the brains are there. If he uses his head he can eat hearty-indefinitely. He might even produce enough to help out Dr. Vogt's friends, the woodland caribou, the Florida manatee, the wolverine and the bighorn sheep. Unfortunately nothing can be done for the extinct Eskimo curlew...