Word: lice
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...most of them do not scratch the surface of the bird world. The closest bird watchers in Britain are the learned Misses Miriam Rothschild and Teresa Clay, who comb the feathers of birds, probe their body openings, search through their nests with microscopes. They are looking for the lice, fleas, ticks, mites, flies, worms and other parasites which swarm over all birds. After many years of study, the Misses Rothschild and Clay have published a lively book, Fleas, Flukes and Cuckoos (Collins, London; 21 s.), packed with detailed information about the fascinating parasites that plague birds...
Fleas, say Authors Rothschild and Clay, are comparative novices in the bird-pestering business. They hop on & off as if they had a life of their own. But lice have been bird parasites as long as birds have been birds. They probably sucked the blood of reptiles from which birds developed. When reptiles' scales turned into birds' feathers, the lice learned to graze and flourish on the new crop...
...world now has about 8,500 species of birds and 25,500 species of feather-eating lice. Nearly every bird has a few lice, and some have thousands. Benjamin Franklin, the Misses Rothschild and Clay report, regretted the choice of the bald eagle as the emblem of America "as he is generally poor and often very lousy." As soon as infant birds climb out of their eggs, the waiting lice set upon them, chewing their feathers and nibbling their skins. They crawl into the throat pouches of pelicans and cormorants. One species feeds exclusively on the tears of swifts...
Orwell's Thoreau like fidelity to the details of life make his war vignettes unforgettable. The soldiers "wretched children" of this "comic opera with an occasional death" were much more concerned with finding firewood killing lice and playing practical jokes than they were with killing Fascists. Orwell's objectivity extended even to his own wound. "The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting," he wrote, "worth describing in detail...
Wheeler was soon picking as fast as any Portuguese, and what time the lice left him in peace was spent in tussles with the army's standing operating procedure. Sometimes a man lost to S.O.P.-as when Wheeler showed up with sore eyes, and was rigorously dosed before the entire regiment with "three ounces and a half of the bitter gall Epsom salts, and two hours knapsack drill in double quick time [to] open my back door...