I love asking people to guess how big passenger pigeon flocks could get. 100,000 birds? A million?
Try two billion. In 1860 one writer described a flock of birds a mile wide that took *14 hours* to pass overhead, packed so dense that it blocked the sun.
Whatever happened to the "wino"?
Is this a species of bum that is on the verge of extinction?
I mean a man, unemployed, often homeless, whose sole vice in life appears to be wine. Not beer, not heroin, not liquor -- wine.
I used to see a few of them, but now I see none.