Bird

Growing up in Broomall, Jesse Grantham remembers two unscripted moments that played an outsized role in shaping the career he would choose and the person he would become. Moment No. 1: He's 8, in the car with his parents, on the way to pick up the babysitter. Once there, he looks up and sees a purple martin rockin' and a-rollin' through an old sycamore tree. He knows about these aerial acrobats from his bird books, but up close, as they dive-bomb for flying insects, they're wildly entertaining.

CORRECTION: Everything old is new again, as they say. Like fried chicken. It's hot and re-happening. Hey, if Mad Men can be cool again - skinny ties and '60s martinis, the uptown picture of retro - why not a shout-out for its country-picnic cousin? Why not, indeed? I chewed over this question. All over town. The results were published in this space more than a month ago. I did not try every establishment's chicken. But I put a pretty big bite in what was out there - crunchy thighs slicked with spiced honey at Resurrection Ale House, served with great German potato salad.

NEW YORK - One of the world's most famous fossil creatures, widely considered the earliest known bird, is getting a rude present on the 150th birthday of its discovery: A new analysis suggests it isn't a bird at all. Chinese scientists are proposing a change to the evolutionary family tree that boots Archaeopteryx off the "bird" branch and onto a closely related branch of birdlike dinosaurs. Archaeopteryx (ahr-kee-AHP'- teh-rihx) was a crow-sized creature that lived about 150 million years ago. It had wings and feathers but also quite un-birdlike traits like teeth and a bony tail.

It's hard to believe, I admit, but here it is coming up on turkey time again. My covered cooker has hardly had a chance to cool and here it is the holidays. Seems like they come earlier every year. Was a time when nobody thought of Christmas until at least after Thanksgiving. Then it was Halloween that marked the beginning of the holiday season. Now it's even before that. I overheard a marketing director say to a second assistant sub-underling late last summer in a department store in Omaha "take the bikini off that mannequin will you?

Australia will issue four commemoratives Thursday promoting support of four water bird species threatened by uncontrolled human incursion into wetlands. The country's wetlands have been under assault by logging, industry and pollution, a scenario familiar elsewhere, and environmentalists warn that such infringement could eliminate the four birds from the continent. Perhaps the most popular bird found in Australia and Tasmania is the black swan, depicted on a 43-cent stamp.

The Eagles yesterday signed Pemberton (N.J.) High product Ed Smith, a tight end, and released recent signee Justin Swift. Smith is 30, but has just three years of pro football experience, having spent nine years playing minor league baseball as a third baseman. The Chicago White Sox signed him out of high school. After signing with the Rams as a free agent in 1996, Smith (6-3, 268 pounds) spent 1996 and '97 on the practice squads of the Redskins and Falcons, respectively. He played about half of the '97 season with the Falcons regular squad and played 15 games and all three postseason games last year during Atlanta's Super Bowl run. The Eagles also cut tackle Greg Studdard from the practice squad.

David Saunders, former chief assistant to Red Grooms, is an interesting artist in his own right. For all the casual appearance of the assemblages in his show at the Mangel Gallery, Saunders has an unfailing ability to create memorable metaphors that suggest the eternal interplay of plant and bird life. To do this, Saunders carves a wooden aggregate in the shape of a natural habitat - complete with real-looking twigs and branches - and then places into its midst a flat, carved, painted bird in an action pose.

What: Bird lemon-juicer Manufacturer: Produced in China Where: Williams-Sonoma Price: $5 This palm-sized juicer will squeeze exactly one lemon slice about 3/4 of an inch wide. It would be fun to pass a flock of these on a serving plate at an informal meal when guests might want to squeeze fresh lemon juice on fish, chicken, vegetables. Consider this juicer an alternative to the cheesecloth netting that restaurants tie around lemon halves so customers don't squirt themselves in the eye. The test.

Maybe hope does spring eternal. So endangered that most bird guides list Campephilus principalis as extinct, the ivory-billed woodpecker has now been found. For centuries, it has inspired its finders, and for six decades it has been silent. More than 100 years ago, a naturalist who saw the ivory-billed woodpecker for the first time wrote about the "majestic and wild personality of this bird, its vigor, its almost frantic aliveness. " That frantic aliveness may have helped the ivory-bill survive through the periods of greatest destruction of its habitat.

Concurrent with its retrospective of "Bay Area Figurative Art 1950-1965," the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts is hosting a film series, with variations on the theme of the Beat Movement. This Sunday's offering (free with museum admission) is Bird (1988), Clint Eastwood's jazzy biography of be-bop saxophonist Charlie Parker. Starring an impressive Forest Whitaker as the creative musician with a self-destructive bent, Bird is a snappy counterpart to the pictures in the exhibition.

At 5:30 a.m., the rain was letting up, but it was still dark as the two men began their rounds of Center City's skyscrapers. They started with a particular alcove, bordered on three sides by glass. Pretty. But not for birds. "They get trapped into this angle," said Stephen Maciejewski, scanning the sidewalk for victims. Confused by all the reflections, "they don't know to turn around. " So they fly into the glass, and they die. As they walked from building to building, he and Keith Russell, Audubon Pennsylvania's science and outreach coordinator in Philadelphia, checked spots where they usually find birds - along sidewalks, behind signs, in stairwells, under cars, atop ledges.

LYONS, TEXAS (population: 40) is where Eagles running-backs coach Ted Williams was born, one of six children. The house where he was delivered is now under water, the site of the biggest man-made lake in the state. It was 1943. It was the age of Jim Crow, fully 2 decades before the passage of major civil-rights legislation by the Congress. "My father wanted to make sure we didn't grow up in the South," Williams said. "He felt we would have a better chance in the West. " He went back a couple of times as a kid and remembered, "You talk about a guy who hated Lyons, Texas.

This will make the stomachs of most Philadelphia sports fans turn. The New York Giants on Wednesday unveiled the championship rings they will get for winning Super Bowl XLVI. It's a nice ring – gaudy as heck, like all Super Bowl rings, but nice. The ring, which was designed by Tiffany & Co., is stacked with diamonds and has four Vince Lombardi trophies to represent the franchise's four Super Bowl titles. It also has sapphires surrounding an "ny" and forming a "Big" blue ring around the top. On the inside of the ring, the words "Finish" and "All in" are engraved.Those were the Giants' catchphrases on their amazing run of 2011.

Growing up in Broomall, Jesse Grantham remembers two unscripted moments that played an outsized role in shaping the career he would choose and the person he would become. Moment No. 1: He's 8, in the car with his parents, on the way to pick up the babysitter. Once there, he looks up and sees a purple martin rockin' and a-rollin' through an old sycamore tree. He knows about these aerial acrobats from his bird books, but up close, as they dive-bomb for flying insects, they're wildly entertaining.

For those who think spring is all about robins arriving, window cleaning, or crocuses budding, I have two words for you: ant sex. Now, I know what you're thinking: Those tiny black creatures marching relentlessly toward the sugar bowl are all infertile females who have no interest in sex. This is true. But when the days lengthen and the earth warms, the thoughts of a select class of ants turn to passion. An ant queen produces all the ants in a colony. The vast majority are sterile female workers.

Union Transfer boasts some of the best sight lines in the city, but even with the stage at Thursday's Andrew Bird concert in full view, you might have been tempted to crane your neck to see where he was hiding his orchestra. Even when he was alone at the microphone — or rather, microphones — with only a violin in his hands, Bird used loop pedals to layer swooping solos on top of sprightly pizzicato, seamlessly integrating snatches of styles ranging from the Wild West to the Middle East.

DEAR ABBY: I am a professional ornithologist (bird expert) with a substantial record of accomplishments — books, scientific papers, blog, website, consultant work, etc. My hometown has held a bird festival for more than a decade and each year it features a main speaker at the dinner. My expertise and experience far outshine that of any of the speakers they have invited by a considerable margin. I am well-known in town, but have not been asked to speak. I talked to the festival board members, and they say I haven't been deliberately excluded, but they didn't give me any reason why I have been ignored.

WITH A CHORUS of boos raining down from the Radio City Music Hall crowd, Matt Schucker couldn't help but smirk. Luckily, Schucker, an Eagles fan, had expected this from the Giants-heavy horde, so he gathered himself and announced the Eagles' fourth-round selection of the NFL draft — Georgia cornerback Brandon Boykin. Schucker, 28, who lives in Lexington, Va., but grew up in Lancaster, was the winner of an Eagles Facebook promotion that sent him and three friends to New York City for an all-expenses-paid trip to the draft.

THE TRADE of @pick_six22 returned a seventh-rounder. It's the most significant return Asante Samuel has made in years. The Eagles traded Samuel to the Falcons for the 229th overall pick in this weekend's draft, apparently because a bag of hammers was way too much to ask. The hammers hit a lot harder than Samuel ever did. The Eagles thought they had solved their secondary problems for the long term when they signed Samuel as...

IT IS NFL draft week and this is an Eagles story that plops Jerry Robinson's name into the first sentence. If you don't know where we're headed, please turn to the features section. You don't belong here. In Philadelphia, some names or phrases serve as shorthand for sore subjects, no explanation required. Joe Carter. Leon Stickle. Chico Ruiz stole home. Moses Malone traded to the Bullets. Von "5 for 1" Hayes. Every NFL draft week, "Jerry Robinson" invariably goes at the end of the sentence that starts, "The Eagles haven't taken a linebacker in the first round since 1979, when they chose . . . " Everyone knows this, bemoans this, laments this.