Bird

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.

A 12-year-old boy expecting a day packed with fun landed in the hospital Thursday afternoon when a bird slammed into his face as he was riding the Kingda Ka roller coaster at Six Flags Great Adventure. Kristin Siebeneicher, a spokeswoman for the park in Jackson, N.J., said that the roller coaster had already plummeted 45 stories back toward the ground and was pulling into the station when the bird struck the boy's face. He suffered minor injuries and was treated at a local hospital, Siebeneicher said.

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.

When Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel were on television debating the merits of Clint Eastwood's new film about alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, Siskel cut through the give-and-take to raise an especially valid point: Bird, whose subject reshaped jazz in his own image in the years after World War II, tells us that Parker's music was great but doesn't show why; and it neglects to give musicological reference points for the benefit of moviegoers unfamiliar...

It was only a moment during the long sweep of the three days of the NFL draft, and Chip Kelly was moving quickly, as always, through the NovaCare Complex hallways. After more than a decade in which the football department was led by a man who arrived like a slow-developing storm front, Kelly is on you like a lightning strike from a clear sky. Around the corner and right there, locking in with eyes that betray nothing. Kelly was on the way from the draft room to the auditorium to give an update to the media between rounds, and an organization official trailed in his deep wake, asking whether he needed this or needed that.

This is a post by Les Bowen on Eagletarian, the Daily News' Eagles blog.   FINALLY, IT'S draft week. Turns out, when your team finishes 4-12 and has a chance to draft fourth, its fan base starts obsessing over that choice, oh, a couple weeks before the season ends. Especially when that fan base is prone to obsessing, in general. So, we're only 4 months into the obsessing. Which is roughly the length of an entire NFL season. People were asking me who the Eagles were going to get in the first round before they'd even hired a coach, which I tried to gently suggest might be somewhat integral to the process of deciding which guy to take.

Ritamary Hanly and Dan McGrath, about to be wed, had a decision to make: Each owned a house, once shared with a now-deceased longtime spouse. Which house to sell? McGrath, who raised three children in his stucco four-bedroom house in Lower Gwynedd, preferred it. Hanly's was smaller. But "she wanted to stay here," says McGrath, a large man with a large smile who owns and manages commercial real estate properties. "Here" is on the Schuylkill in West Norriton, where belted kingfishers, great blue herons, and falcons are backyard neighbors.

BEIJING - Two more people have died in China from a new strain of bird flu, raising the death toll from the virus to 13, state media reported Sunday. The official Xinhua news agency said the two deaths were reported in Shanghai and that three new cases were also confirmed in the financial hub. A total of 11 new cases were reported Sunday - including two in a central province that previously had been unaffected. In all, 60 cases of the virus, known as H7N9, have been reported in China.

IF YOU live anywhere above the ground floor, your cat could be injured falling out a window, possibly jumping after something interesting such as a bird. As the weather warms, people will be opening windows and putting their pets at risk. But it's possible to give a cat fresh air safely. If you're in multifamily housing, you may be allowed to add heavy screening to a balcony. In a detached home, you can put in a more permanent structure, such as a screened-in multilevel cat playground.

BEIJING - In a worrisome sign, a bird flu in China appears to have mutated so that it can spread to other animals, raising the potential for a bigger threat to people, scientists said Wednesday. So far, the flu has sickened nine people in China and killed three. It's not clear how they became infected, but there's no evidence the virus is spreading easily among people. But the virus can, evidently, move through poultry without making them sick, experts said, making it difficult to track the germ in flocks.

Eagles running back Dion Lewis is on the trading block, according to NFL sources. Lewis is behind LeSean McCoy, Bryce Brown, and Chris Polk on the team's depth chart, and those three all offer size and skills that fit coach Chip Kelly's system better than Lewis. At 5-foot-8 and 195 pounds, Lewis is smaller than the other running backs. The 2011 fifth-round pick has 171 rushing yards on 36 career carries. His best game was the 2011 season finale, when he rushed for 58 yards and a touchdown.

ROBERT BUGGEY pulled out of the Frankford Transportation Center, drove his SEPTA Route 88 bus through Mayfair, Holmesburg and Bustleton, across the Montgomery County line and up a tree-lined stretch of Moreland Road near Huntingdon Pike, where he said, "I've seen turkey vultures having lunch in the road. Deer. The guy in that house raises guinea hens. I've seen them on the road, too. " The critters all survived because Buggey, 61, a SEPTA bus operator for 40 years, still has the intense focus he learned as a young Marine Corps truck driver.

If someone kidnapped puppies and kittens, tied ropes around their necks, stuffed them into tiny boxes, and then released them to be shot at close range, it would be considered intolerably cruel. But substitute pigeons for puppies, and it's tolerated as a biweekly sporting event in Berks County. Astonishingly, pigeon shoots are still going on in Pennsylvania, and game officials have done little to stop them. Even though bills to explicitly outlaw the hideous practice have been repeatedly introduced in the legislature over the years, none has progressed beyond committee approval.

QUARTERBACK G.J. Kinne, who went undrafted out of Tulsa last year, signed a 2-year deal with the Eagles Tuesday, according to the team's website. Kinne signed with the New York Jets following last year's NFL draft, but was released over the summer and recently joined the San Antonio Talons of the Arena Football League. After transferring to Tulsa from Texas following his redshirt sophomore season, Kinne spent three seasons at QB, throwing for 9,472 yards (249 yards per game).