Wild Ones 2 Bears Flashcards
mangy
in poor condition; shabby: a girl in a mangy fur coat.
“The bear was 235-pound female-semiconscious, injured mangy-looking by some accounts, and, Collier judged, shrunken to about half its normal weight by Mississippi’s drought.” (62)
oppossum
an American marsupial that has a ratlike prehensile tail and hind feet with an opposable thumb.
“The bear was a helpless victim roped to a tree. The president of the United States decided to show it some mercy. Taft, on the other hand, ate his opossum for supper. He ate a lot of it, in fact-so much that, after his first several helpings, a doctor seated nearby actually passed him a note, suggesting it might be a good idea if he slowed down. ‘Well I like possum,’ Taft told reporters the next day. ‘I ate very heartily of it last night, and it did not disturb in the slightest my digestion or my sleep.’ “ (71)
prehinsile
(chiefly of an animal’s limb or tail) capable of grasping.
possum
a tree-dwelling Australasian marsupial that typically has a prehensile tail.
Both the Australian possum and the American opossum are marsupials. The Australian Possum is cuter and does not have pointy teeth.
The word “opossum” is borrowed from the Virginia Algonquian (Powhatan) language, and was first recorded between 1607 and 1611 by the Jamestown colonists John Smith (as “opassom”) and William Strachey (as “aposoum”).[3] The word ultimately derives from the Proto-Algonquian word *wa˙p- aʔθemw, meaning “white dog” or “white beast/animal” . James Cook’s botanist called the australian marcupials possums because they looked like the north American opossum.
ephemeral
lasting for a very short time: fashions are ephemeral.
“…drawing ephemeral distinctions between phrases like ‘on the brink of extinction’ and ‘the step just prior to the brink of extinction’ that allowed it to define ‘threatened’ in a way that applied perfectly to the polar bear’s situation.” (73-74)
ebullient
cheerful and full of energy: she sounded ebullient and happy.
“Margie Carroll, an ebullient, retired schoolteacher from Georgia who’d come to Churchill to sell copies of her self-published children’s book ‘Portia Polar Bear’s Birthday Wish.’ “ (82)
visceral
relating to deep inward feelings rather than to the intellect: the voters’ visceral fear of change.
“The fact that something as large and autonomous-seeming as a polar bear might stop existing, and the even more tremendous fact of climate change, made me viscerally uneasy whenever I allowed myself to truly think about them.” (85)
viscera (singular viscus)
the internal organs in the main cavities of the body, especially those in the abdomen, e.g., the intestines.
ringed seal
a seal of arctic and subarctic waters that has pale ring-shaped markings on the back and sides and a short muzzle.
harbinger
n. a person or thing that announces or signals the approach of another
“The polar bear had been useful as a pure white, cuddly harbinger of horrible things-a victim of climate change at just the right remove from our own species to be palatable and approachable and inspire us to change.”
buckweat
an Asian plant of the Polygonaceae family that produces starchy seeds. The seeds are used for fodder and are also milled into flour that is widely used in the US.
“an individual Lange’s metalmark may never venture more than a thousand feet from the buckwheat plant it hatches on-the range within which it can lay its eggs is extremely limited.”
leguminous
“In recent years, the most recklessly spreading weed has been a scraggly, purple-flowered legume with a sinister-sounding name to boot.”
relating to or denoting plants of the pea family (Leguminosae). They have seeds in pods, distinctive flowers, and typically root nodules containing symbiotic bacteria able to fix nitrogen. Compare with papilionaceous.
lepidoptera
an order of insects that comprises the butterflies and moths. They have four large scale-covered wings that bear distinctive markings, and larvae that are caterpillars.
“The city became a hot spot for lepidopterists in the late nineteenth century.” (121)
rejoinder
a reply, especially a sharp or witty one: she would have made some cutting rejoinder but none came to mind.
“In a 1910 profile headlined ‘By Day He Catches Burglars; By Night He Catches Bugs,’ the San Francisco Call presented the cop as a brawny rejoinder to the image of entomologists as ‘blue spectacled old men, with long hair pasty faces peering into slimy pools.’ “ (121)
far-flung
distant or remote
During the Depression, it was difficult for entomologists to travel to far-flung places for research. The Antioch Dunes emerged as an alternative study site for entomologists at the universities in Berkeley and Davis-and an endlessly fascinating one.”
