Word: bird
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Richard Wheeler wants to tell you a story about a bird--a fine but flightless bird that lived a long time ago in the North Atlantic. "A magnificent creature," he calls the great auk, "an extraordinary paddler and swimmer." Sitting on the deck of a Wareham, Mass., home adorned by portraits and a sculpture of the 2-ft.-tall black-and-white bird, the shaggy-maned Wheeler scowls when he thinks about the great auk's fate. During the 18th and 19th centuries, commercial fishing vessels scoured the waters off North America for cod. Since the all but defenseless great...
...Wheeler, the lost bird was a herald of humanity's continuing plunder of the seas. Having devastated the cod population, Atlantic fishing boats are exhausting the haddock, herring and flounder. "How do you make people see that we are strip-mining the oceans?" Wheeler, once a commercial fisherman himself, asks, his voice edged with puzzlement. "I find myself depressed. Our relationship with the planet is terribly flawed...
...former U.S. Navy deep-sea diver and a veteran kayaker, he set out on a solo 1,500-mile kayak trip from Newfoundland to Buzzards Bay, Mass., following the seasonal migration route of the great auk--as much a feat for a man with a paddle as for a bird that could not fly. He hoped the attention the perilous journey would receive would send a clear message: "What we did to the auk, we are now doing to other species...
Excavations can pose tricky dilemmas. Who wouldn't want to hear a new Beatles song, and yet who would want to hear Free as a Bird more than once? Sometimes the appeal is more than mere novelty: a discarded thought can be more revealing, more intimate than a finished work; it's like catching an old friend off guard. A yen for uncooked art, for malleable art, is also more in keeping with our crude, relativistic times...
...other words, the researchers said, bird memory functions pretty much like ours. Humans remember crucial events by placing themselves back in time mentally; so, it seems, do birds. That poses interesting questions about evolution, since we parted company with the ancestors of our avian companions more than 250 million years ago. Did such advanced information storage arrive before the dinosaurs did? If only we could remember...