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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