Word: albatross
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Navy will never be successful in its attempt to move the albatross from Midway Island [Oct. 26]. I have helped some of these gooney birds to build their nests, and the aid was accepted gracefully, but the bird selects the site. Once I moved a nest, egg and all, to a new site only three feet distant; the bird was thoroughly confused and went about building a new nest on the original site...
...genocidal plan for making Midway Island safe for Homo Americanus volitans makes one suspect that the Navy is not up on its Ancient Mariner. If it were, the Navy would know that the penalty for killing an albatross is disaster...
American whalemen knew the albatross as the "goney" bird long before the U.S. Navy had any interest in the Pacific. There is a whaleman's song entitled The Wings of a Goney, from the logbook of the whaling bark Ocean Rover on a voyage made in 1859 that starts...
...clouds as if to welcome planes on landing or to see them off on takeoffs. Often they fly smack into an airborne craft. They have dived into propellers, smashed against expensive radomes, causing about $300,000 damage a year. Far worse is the ever-present danger that a Midway albatross may someday really clobber a $6,000,000 plane and cause a fatal crackup...
...attempt to soothe man and bird alike, the Navy is creating an airport for albatrosses on the nearby, nonstrategic island of Kure, hopes to build up the small albatross population there (current count: 700). Fortnight ago Navy bulldozers cut a series of 50-ft. swaths through the brush to make special gooney runways. But last week, at the peak of their mating season, the gooneys again defied the U.S. Navy. As ornithologists had predicted, not one winged off to the new, man-made sanctuary...