Word: penguins
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...size: in engineers' lingo it has a prodigiously high "solidarity factor." But all it has for wings are thin, knife-edged trapezoids no bigger than dining-room tables. Even squatting on the ground it looks wickedly fast, but its wings, apparently as rudimentary as the wings of a penguin, do not look as if they could lift it into...
...CANTERBURY TALES (528 pp.)-A New Translation by Nevlll Coghill-Penguin...
Sometimes the message comes from a waddling polar bear, sometimes from a skating penguin, a magic rabbit or a talking dog. Sometimes it comes in a display of hurtling rockets, spinning alphabets or galaxies of exploding stars. If the pitch is entrusted to a human, there is always the smile - broad, ecstatic, spreading from one side of the screen to the other as it expresses satisfaction over a cigarette, a glass of beer, a bright new refrigerator...
...Kinsey of the penguin world is a New Zealand ornithologist named Lancelot Eric Richdale. For ten breeding seasons he watched colonies of yellow-eyed penguins (Megadyptes antipodes) on the coast of New Zealand's South Island. He made friends with the birds, attached identifying bands to their legs, and spied with a telescope upon their domestic affairs. In a new book, Sexual Behavior in Penguins (University of Kansas Press; $5), he tells what he learned about their lives and loves, "marriages" and "divorces...
...Penguins, he found, are as proper as they look, and they are reasonably faithful mates. Most of their "marriages" last for more than one season. The main threat to family stability is the normal surplus of "unemployed males." Every female penguin gets plenty of propositions. She usually chills the encroacher with a fixed, glassy stare, but sometimes she first tolerates, then welcomes his attentions. It takes a long time to break up a penguin home, for a new pair can be formed only after a long period of ceremonial adjustment...