Word: undergrowths
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After 18 years in the corps, Fisher takes Somalia's discomforts in stride: humidity that soaks uniforms in sweat, swarms of flies, malaria-carrying mosquitoes undeterred by repellent, sun that blisters the skin. There are scorpions and cobras in the undergrowth, and the prevalent vegetation -- thorn trees covered with needle-sharp spines -- must be chopped down to make encampments...
...cortege of armored vehicles parks in the undergrowth along the roadside. Nine hours will pass before Team Tiger begins the last leg of its 180-mile journey to Baidoa. Sotak waves to Marines passing by on the bed of a truck. "Those are the real grunts," he says. "When it rains, it's awful, and they can't take stuff like this with them." Sotak opens a St. Louis Cardinals bag holding his only sources of entertainment: a box with a chess set and a small electronic football simulation game...
Kennedy snaps on his blue roof light and hits the gas. Within minutes, he reaches the Cessna 441. Its props are still turning, but the pilot has fled into the dense, swampy undergrowth. Dressed for the office in a suit and loafers, Kennedy pulls a Walther PPK from his ankle holster and gamely wades in, immediately losing a shoe to the muck. Reinforcements soon join him, and the search goes on for hours. Though the pilot manages to evade them, Kennedy and his colleagues seize nearly a ton of cocaine from the abandoned plane...
...seems almost natural when a 2,500-lb. bull rhinoceros crashes out of the undergrowth in a full thundering charge. "Here, Macho," Bentsen calls. "How 'bout an apple for breakfast?" The massive beast puts on the brakes just short of a six-bar iron fence that separates man and animal. With a deft twist of his heavy, pointed lips, Macho plucks a slice of apple from Bentsen's hand. Bentsen reaches through the bars to scratch the leathery muzzle. Rhinos are slow-witted, almost childlike creatures that when startled tend to charge first and ask questions later. But once...
...species that had no commercial value as well as the highly prized Douglas fir, seemed too inefficient to the Government foresters. Now, perhaps too late, research has shown that clear-cuts tend to break an important ecological chain: they destroy the habitat of small mammals that shelter in forest undergrowth. These creatures eat and distribute mycorrhizal fungi, which grow among the rootlets of saplings and help the trees absorb water and nutrients. There may be enough spores of fungi in the soil after a clear-cut to start a second-growth forest, but a third crop is less likely...