Word: bandicoots
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...celebrate Earth Week (this year's version of Earth Day, spread over April 18-24), New York's Bronx Zoo set up this ominous "Animal Graveyard." Each of the 225 tombstones commemorates a species that has become extinct since 1600-e.g. the New South Wales barred bandicoot, Labrador duck, Malagasy great tortoise and Haitian long-tongued bat. Wildlife experts say that at least 75% of the extinct creatures vanished as a result of human activity...
...anthology is a sort of zoo. The literary lions are not at their best caged up away from their own kind, and may look ridiculous if housed next door to a morose musk ox or an albino bandicoot. Even the labels may go wrong, and the surly, myopic wombat is advertised as a Thomson's gazelle. But the zoogoers don't mind. They have always known that some animals are nicer than others. So it is with anthologies; they are compiled for those who have been taught to be kind to writers but are nervous as to whether...
...reader does not get far into this book before beginning to suspect that it is a put-on. Who ever heard of the long-nosed bandicoot? Or the brolgas, which break into a wild, wing-flapping dance at the sound of a bell? How about the racquet-tailed drongo, and the mudskipper, a hippopotamus-shaped fish that likes to skitter across mud flats and climb mangrove roots? Or the mallee fowl, which assiduously builds an incubator for its eggs and keeps the temperature inside at a steady 95°, come rain or shine? Curious specimens these, but Naturalist Gerald Durrell...
...Plenty Bandicoot. Nawnim became Norman, was sent to be educated in the caste-free South, accepted his "cigaret-stain" skin as a legacy from his mother (a Javanese princess, Oscar assured him). He returned to Oscar's farm a trained mechanic, looked like a "Rajah." The girls shouted when they saw him, "Oozit . . . Mygawdaineeflash ! " Abysmally unprepared for the Jim Crow strait jacket of Capricornia, he got an idea of his status from the white insults and the black friendliness...
...avoid white men's towns. But the wet season with its cockeye bobs (man-eating storms) turned his plans topsy-turvy. Lost for days, his horses gone, Norman was picked up by a band of aborigines and comforted: "Proper good country dis one. Plenty kangaroo, plenty buffalo, plenty bandicoot, plenty yam, plenty goose, plenty duck, plenty lubra [squaws], plenty corroboree [dancing...