Kind of funny, Gary. Kind of sad.

Along a similar vein of marketing personnel churning out consumer product:

There's a store brand (Safeway, I think, not sure) of instant oatmeal in
which the illustration on the individual packets is a wheat spike (or some
similar species). Wheat, oats, it all just comes out of a factory, how could
they possibly look different?

Kelly Cassidy

-----Original Message-----
From: tweeters-bounces at mailman2.u.washington.edu
[mailto:tweeters-bounces at mailman2.u.washington.edu] On Behalf Of Gary
Bletsch
Sent: Monday, November 30, 2009 9:41 PM
To: tweeters tweeters
Subject: [Tweeters] off-topic bird puzzle errors

Dear Tweeters,

My wife picked up an inexpensive jigsaw puzzle to give to a niece or nephew
for Xmas. I glanced at it and realized that it is full of errors!

The puzzle comes from some catalogue they had at my wife's workplace. The
box boasts that this "Official Birds of the States" puzzle is made in the
USA. It's put out by TDC Puzzles of Itasca, IL.

A look at the cover reveals the following mistakes:

--The Roadrunner shown on Arizona is labelled as a Cactus Wren, and the
Cactus Wren shown for New Mexico is labelled as a Roadrunner.

--The gull shown on Utah is called an "American Gull." It might be a
California Gull--maybe the Utah folks don't want another state's name on
their state's locust-eating bird? Maybe they should pick the Armenian Gull
instead--it would have a lot of the same letters, and NO other state would
ever pick this one!

--The photo of an American Robin on Wisconsin looks great; oddly enough, the
bird right across the lake on Michigan is also labelled as an American
Robin, but it's a European Robin!

--My favorite one is the gaffe on Alabama. It's labelled "Yellowhammer," and
that's exactly what is shown: the emberizid bunting known in England as the
Yellowhammer, and not the Yellow-shafted Flicker (sometimes called
Yellowhammer via a sort of folk-etymology).

One thing that the puzzle is good for, though, is showing how little
imagination the legislators had when they picked these things. The whole
West is simply littered with Western Meadowlarks.

Even more astounding is a huge bloc of 7 contiguous states in the East and
Central part of the country, all showing the Cardinal! That would be
Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, and North
Carolina. The folks at TDC Puzzles found a way to mess this up, too; the
Cardinal photograph on Kentucky shows one of those hapless individuals with
no feathers on its head. This makes it look like some monstrous, vulturine
beast, black-headed, but with a red beak and body!

Yours truly,

Gary Bletsch ? Near Lyman, Washington (Skagit County), USA ?
garybletsch at yahoo.com ? ?

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