Word: fish
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...more he watched the clumsy, black-and-white wood stork as it fished in the muddy Florida swamp, the more vacationing Zoologist Marvin Philip Kahl Jr. was puzzled. As the big bird slogged awkwardly through the murky, weed-choked water, its long, curved beak dangling half open, it was hardly the picture of a successful predator. Yet it was snagging a fish every couple of seconds. How was it spotting its prey...
...Georgia campus, and studied the problem with the help of Professor L. J. Peacock. One stork was fitted out with segments of a blackened pingpong ball over each eye, and both birds were turned loose in a shallow pool filled with minnows. The blinkered stork sloshed ahead, snapping up fish as quickly as its wide-eyed mate. Vision, the two zoologists explained in the British magazine Nature, has no part in the wood stork's fishing technique. The bird's beak is something like a repeating mouse trap, snapping shut on anything that touches it. If a fish...
Flags on the Rigging. The white marlin's poundage makes it a light-tackle fish by strict fishermanly standards, but charter-boat skippers usually load their reels with 50-lb. test line to give their clients a fighting chance. Even so, the big ones often get away. But there are days when everything goes right, when the marlins gobble every bait in sight, when the Jack Spot boils with leaping fish, and blue and white flags flutter gaily on the rigging of the boats-one flag for each marlin caught...
Once the happy fisherman is ashore and his catch is measured and weighed, other kinds of fish swarm around him. He pays the captain ($110), throws in a tip ($10), poses for a photograph with his marlin ($2), gets loaded up with certificates and buttons attesting his fortitude and skill (free). Then, while he is weak with pride, a stranger comes up to him, bubbles congratulations and whips out an order pad. "Guess you'll be wanting it mounted," he says...
Well, let's see. Your fish is 6 ft. 7 in. At $1.50 an inch, that comes to $118.50." The fisherman's smile fades. "You understand, of course," the stranger says soothingly, "that we can arrange an installment plan...