birdlime


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birdlime

a sticky substance, prepared from holly, mistletoe, or other plants, smeared on twigs to catch small birds
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If he wondered at his clothes encrusted with bits of chalky birdlime that can't be scrubbed out, he has said nothing about it to his wife who will arrange discreetly for the clothes to be dry-cleaned, when they return home.
Blue Guide
A second hunting method Rihani uses is scattering branches covered with birdlime in various parts of the forest.
Amid crackdown on rifles, southern hunter uses the lure of sex to trap his birds
Search, for instance, the fields and forests of Aesop, whose talking beasts are the ancestors of both Chanticleer the Rooster and Walter the Farting Dog, and you will meet ten cocks, a cote of doves, several partridges, a caged songbird, six crows, three ravens (one portentous, another self-loathing), a dozen or so eagles, five jack-daws (one of whom wishes he were an eagle), many kites, flocks of cranes, two storks, three hawks, a cote of pigeons, three hens, a sparrow with a bad case of schadenfreude, five swallows, many peacocks, a jay who wishes he were a peacock, many swans, two nightingales, two larks, two owls, a gluttonous seagull, a thrush ensnared in birdlime, and nary a single duck.
Moby-Duck or, the synthetic wilderness of childhood
Ancient herbalists found medicinal uses for both berries and leaves, and holly bark was once in demand for the production of birdlime. This is a sticky substance which was spread on branches to trap song birds.
Letter: NATURE WATCH; RURAL LIVING
"excellent person" (SP G4); "excellent selfe" (DM 1.1.442); "Excellent Hyenna" (DM 2.5.53); "excellent knave" (DM 4.2.59); "excellent Lady" (DM 5.2.170, 5.2.208; DLC 1.1.193, 1.2.171); "excellent Mistres" (DLC 1.2.35); "Excellent Creature" (WD 1.2.202); "Excellent Divell" (WD 1.2.246); "Excellent Lodovico" (WD 5.3.215); "excellent Birdlime" (WH 1.1.85).
John Webster's handbook of model letters: a study in attribution
Likewise, in the opening scene of Dekker and Webster's Westward Ho (written c 1604) another anonymous tailor appears, only to be verbally abused by Mistress Birdlime: (25) 'Taylor, you talk like an asse' (1.1.24).
A greatly exaggerated demise: the remaking of the children of Paul's as the Duke of York's men (1608)
After the raids experts found that half of the birds still had feathers covered in 'birdlime', used to stick the wings in order to snare wild birds.
Fancier fined for wild birds trapping
viscivorus) by means of "parany" traps (involving the use of birdlime).
CASES IN THE EUROPEAN COURT OF JUSTICE
The hidden pearl suggests why the man of line 154 is braving the dangers of the high seas, but not why he signs in birdlime. Perhaps it is unrealistic to expect perfect coherence at all levels in such complex wordplay.
Wordplay and the contextual circle in Queneau's Petite Cosmogonie Portative

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