Listener No 4543 Migratory Birds By Malva

[Ruthrobin]

Lots of people are having trouble finding it. If you go onto the HOME page of the crossword club site and scroll down to The Listener, you can find it there.

[emcee]

The main part of the puzzle was relatively straightforward -- much as last week's the main skill needed was care. I enjoyed this first part immensely.

The final part turns out to be a pain and I'm not confident that the three birds I've found are the ones intended.

Not my favourite type of endgame but otherwise great. Thanks to Malva.

[Hagen]

I agree with Emcee. This looked like a doddle at first sight, so I was rather surprised that none of the clues made sense until I tumbled to Malva's clever trick. I enjoyed the solve enormously...

...until the endgame. Searching for jumbled words is OK I suppose if you know exactly what you're looking for, but with the many possibilities here, and short words into the bargain, I think it's an unnecessary obstacle. I have found three birds, two of which I am confident are correct. The third seems rather out of place. It is quite possible that I have missed the subtlety of "very muddled" and if so, I will be happy to stand corrected.

[tnap]

Three muddled birds found, but no confidence whatsoever that they are the right ones or that more couldn't be found. If there are precisely 3, then Malva and the editors must have done a stupendous amount of checking.

[Monkmonk]

There are 8 possibilities per column and there are 12 columns which means that there are 96 possible 5-letter anagrams. Not very difficult to check this number.

[Flocker14]

This was mostly top notch and would have been wholly so if only the endgame (which in itself is fine) had been more clearly defined by the preamble. I spent too much time chasing wider possibilities than were in fact intended.

[upsetter]

Satisfying grid fill - thanks, Malva.

[IainGrace]

Slightly unsatisfactory in that one gets to the stage with, say, two thirds of the grid completed where one can finish it without bothering fully to deconstruct the clues or search for all the birds.

[12barblues]

A relatively simple gridfill once you catch on to what’s going on. As others mention, a couple of the muddled birds could be considered suspect but they are there in Chambers ........ so even if wrong I’ll call this a completion

[icynorth]

A fun solve, thanks Malva, but the treatment made the clues too easy to parse, and the puzzle too quick to solve.

And although it’s impressive getting birds into every clue, the surface readings weren’t great in many cases.

[IainGrace]

Assuming we have interpreted the rubric correctly, there is at least one vertical line which contains the names of two very common birds.

[sunny-dave]

It's endgames like this which make me so glad I don't submit - either I'm missing something quite subtle (entirely possible), or it's a bore-fest of checking 96 possible anagrams.

I've found three birds - they're in Chambers - so I'm done.

A shame - because I like Malva's puzzles and the grid fill here was pleasantly challenging.

[IainGrace]

By way of clarification, we have two birds in one line and two others in separate lines, so the crossword is flawed unless we have misunderstood the rubric.

[Keepatit]

I think you have misunderstood the rubric. Perhaps one of your two birds in a single column is not muddled at all

[borealis]

Quick but fun, and I've sent the puzzle to a couple of would-be Listener solvers as a fun one. I'm OK with the three at the end; I suspect "very" avoids slightly wrong shading on the middle one.