Word: snipes
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...daughter on Boar's Hill, five miles from Oxford, where his melancholy mien and rusty, plunging gait are a perennial peripatetic phenomenon. He founded the amateur Boar's Hill Players, who acted now Shakespeare, now Masefield; he himself once played the ghost in Hamlet, hinnying like a snipe...
...Political punsters and cartoonists opened their birdbooks to amplify their knowledge of the bird (Philohela Minor) whose name Commissioner Woodcock bears. An upland species of snipe, highly prized by sportsmen and epicures, the woodcock has a long, long bill and practically no tail at all. Its plumage is heavily mottled- brown, black, buff, grey-protective coloration for thickety ground. It can thrive only in wet (or at least moist) places, where it can probe for worms without bending or breaking its bill. That it may spy its enemies while it feeds, its eyes-large, nearsighted, goggling-are close together near...
Before plovers' eggs were put in a class with egret they, could be eaten (in season) at any smart London restaurant for the genteel price of one guinea ($5.10) per egg. "Plover" in restaurant parlance is a handy name for almost any "wader," vaguely similar to a snipe or sandpiper. The species most common in England (and the U. S.) is the ringed plover, "Billdeer." Crocodiles like plovers, not to eat but because the birds pick leeches and other parasites from saurian mouths. Also a sleepy crocodile knows that with a few plovers about it is safe to doze...