The ghost hunter.Tim Gallagher got his Eureka moment in the swamps SWAMPS - Special Warfare Automated Mission Planning System (Naval Special Warfare Command, San Diego, CA) of Arkansas on February 27, 2004. In his book The Grail GRAIL - Graphical Input Language. A flow chart language entered on a graphics tablet. The graphical follow-on to JOSS. ["The GRAIL Language and Operations", T.O. Ellis et al, RM-6001-ARPA, RAND, Sept 1969]. Bird: Hot on the Trail of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker ivory-billed woodpecker woodpecker, common name for members of the Picidae, a large family of climbing birds found in most parts of the world. Woodpeckers typically have sharp, chisellike bills for pecking holes in tree trunks, and long, barbed, extensible tongues with which they impale their insect prey. Their spiny tail feathers act as a prop in climbing, resting, and drilling., common name for the largest of the North American woodpeckers, Campephilus principalis. Once plentiful in Southern hardwood forests, since 1952 it was believed to be extinct or nearing extinction. The last known members of this species had been reported from the deepest forests of NW Florida and central Louisiana, and there were no confirmed sightings after 1944 until 2004, when one may have been spotted in an E Arkansas swamp. (Houghton Mifflin, $25) this lifetime birder and magazine editor at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology writes about fulfilling a long-held dream: "And then it happened. Less than 80 feet away, a large black-and-white bird that had been flying toward us from a side channel of the bayou to the right came out into the sunshine and flew across the open stretch of water directly in front of us. It started to bank, giving us a superb view of its back and both wings ... We both cried out simultaneously, 'Ivory-bill.'" The rest, you might say, is history. A few months later, another Cornell researcher shot a fuzzy video of an ivory-bill, and the distinguished journal Science made it official. The grail bird, last reliably seen in 1944, was back. Gallagher's book makes exciting reading, capturing the hard work that led to a rediscovery that electrified the world. One hopes, after the news sinks in, we'll have the good sense to preserve the southern swamp forest habitat that this elusive bird needs for survival. If we had been smarter, we'd still have the passenger pigeon and the parakeet parakeet or parrakeet, common name for a widespread group of small parrots, native to the Indo-Malayan region and popular as cage birds. Parakeets have long, pointed tails, unlike the chunky lovebirds with which they are sometimes confused. The budgerigar, also called the shell, zebra, or grass, parakeet (Melopsittacus undulatus), is the best known of the true parakeets.">Carolina parakeet Carolina parakeet, small, long-tailed bird, Canuropsis carolinensis, now believed extinct. The Carolina parakeet was the northernmost representative of the parrot family. It had green plumage with a yellow head and orange cheek patches and forehead. The largest specimens were 13 in. (33 cm) in length, including the tail feathers.. |
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