ALIVE, ALIVE-O! Inverclyde council in Scotland is proud of the
bird life to be found in the inner Clyde estuary, which has been
designated a site of special scientific interest. The council
devotes a page of its website to the birds that live there or
pass through. The Clyde, it tells us, is the most northerly of
the large west-coast estuaries in the UK that are used by
migrating birds. But there is a puzzle about this otherwise
attractive and informative web page. A discussion of the feeding
habits of the birds in the area contains this mystifying
sentence: "Mussels and *bleep*les, the principal food source for
scaup, goldeneye and eider, are found in large concentrations on
Mussel Bank and *bleep*le Bank." It took Liam Anton, who
discovered this, a while to work out what is going on here. At
last he realised that the council's net censor ... To continue
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