Word: fauna
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...liberal Catholic journal The Critic. Here a prim stewardess warns a passenger, "You can't read erotic books while we're in Irish air space," and two dour leprechauns, spotting a leprechaun bishop under a toadstool, observe. "So much for our carefree, puckish way of life." Funny fauna inhabit Animals, Animals, Animals, edited by George Booth, Gahan Wilson and Ron Wolin (Harper & Row; 241 pages; $12.50), an old-fashioned chortler of a book. Next to a sign reading DO NOT FEED THE BEARS a smirking moose wears his own sign: I AM NOT A BEAR. Elephants stand around...
Stirred out of his midday snooze, the large hippopotamus emerged from the crocodile-infested waters and lumbered onto the lake shore, leaving giant footprints in the mud. Soon a small, upright figure appeared. Perhaps looking for prey, he carefully trod among the wading birds and other fauna, crossing the trail of large prints along the shore...
Maui, with its rain forests and high volcanic range, boasts some 1,300 of the higher plants that exist only in the Hawaiian Islands. Indigenous birds include the black-necked stilt, the claw-footed nene, the short-eared owl and the blue-faced booby, and there are such unique fauna as the monk seal, the hoary bat and the predacious caterpillar. (There are no snakes on the islands.) Maui's waters teem with more than 700 species of fish, perhaps 20% of which are to be found only in Hawaii. The island's most faithful visitor...
...ranges, the area receives an average of 10 in. of rain a year, usually all at once, vs. 36.5 in. in more fertile northern Pakistan, near Kashmir. In summer, temperatures can rise to 130° F. In winter, they can fall to subfreezing levels. Desert scorpions and other noxious fauna abound. Prolonged exposure to Baluchistan can be fatal: when the army of Alexander the Great marched across it on the way home from India, two-thirds of the men died. But local folklore has it that Baluchistan's towering hills are carpets covering vast troves of mineral wealth...
...shall the environment be protected? Opponents of refunding want to make the Endangered Species Act less rigid, especially when a species is being protected at the expense of what they consider the larger public good. Accordingly, some members of Congress have submitted legislation that would allow endangered flora and fauna to be wiped out if saving them proved too costly. Says an aide to Robin Beard, a Tennessee Republican leading the House antifunding forces: "The problem now is that the law allows no exceptions. It doesn't matter what the circumstances...