Word: flightless
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...nowhere else in the world. But what nature can accomplish in eons, humanity can undo in millenniums, and that is exactly what the species Homo sapiens has done on Mauritius. By his own actions-and those of the animals he has introduced-man has already done away away the flightless black parrot, the giant Mauritian tortoise and the dodo, the huge bird whose very name has become synonymous with extinction. Now civilization threatens the rest of this island nation's rare birds and mammals...
...nest on cliffs and other towering places, is no easy trick. And breeding the falcons and returning their offspring to nature are even more difficult. So that peregrine chicks will think of their new man-made eyries as natural homes, they must be placed while they are still flightless-and thus most vulnerable to predators. Great horned owls, the peregrine's major natural enemy, killed two of the birds released in New York State last year. One was electrocuted when it lighted on a high-voltage transformer...
...horrified by this irony and notes that the last passenger pigeon on earth died in 1914−in a zoo. He has chosen the extinct dodo as SAFE'S emblem, and sports a button reading "Dodo Power," in the hope of dramatizing the urgency of the situation: the flightless bird was extinct only 186 years after Europeans landed on its home island of Mauritius. "The dodo was part of a delicate spider web that connects us all," says Durrell. "Every time you muck about with that web, it sends tremors all the way through...
...life conservation; in Stony Brook, Long Island. In 1912 Murphy shipped aboard an Antarctic whaler as assistant navigator, and brought back bird, plant and fish specimens never before seen in the U.S. Among the discoveries of his 61-year career were the skeleton of the New Zealand moa, a flightless bird of centuries ago, and the cahow, a sea bird believed to have been extinct since the 17th century. As bird curator at Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History, he sailed on more than a dozen ocean expeditions, wrote nearly 600 articles and ten books (among them, Logbook...
...latest advance in insect weaponry came to light while a team of Cornell University scientists was studying a flightless Southern grasshopper called Romalea microptera. During egg-laying periods, when the female Romalea has its large abdomen stuck in the soil, and at other times when the grasshopper is vulnerable to attack by ants, it noisily emits from openings in its thorax a foul-smelling, brownish froth that halts predator ants in their tracks. To find out why the liquid is so effective, the scientists, led by Biologist Thomas Eisner, extracted it from several hundred grasshoppers and analyzed its contents...