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LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:

Title: “Lofty Aspirations”
Prompt: This week’s 12-letter answer describes where some creatures can go and others cannot.
Answer: FAR-OFF WORLDS
Correct entries: 336 overall, of which 244 were solo

If you stared at last week’s grid, you’d start to notice a subtle avian presence lurking therein. In all, a dozen of our winged friends concealed themselves in grid entries:

FRATERNITY
WIKI-WIKI
ASWAN
OVERHEATED
REMUS
READ OVER
OTHER ONE
FINGER BOWL
LOST RICHES
FAUXHAWK
DODOMA
SAMOAN

There’s also a suggestive clue for the last Across, SKY at 111-A: [Where some creatures can go]. This echoes the puzzle’s prompt, so probably means something.

Now what? Well, these are no random sampling of birds: there’s a high (!) incidence of flightless birds among the pack. In fact, six of the twelve can’t get airborne with a plane ticket: KIWI, RHEA, EMU, OSTRICH, DODO, and the extinct MOA.

Now let’s separate these out by their concealed words (probably not the first thing you tried, which would’ve been separating them out by bird names, but maybe it was the second or third). Flighted birds up top, since that how Mother Nature does it:

FRATERNITY
ASWAN
READ OVER
OTHER ONE
FINGER BOWL
FAUXHAWK

And now grounded:

WIKI-WIKI
OVERHEATED
REMUS
LOST RICHES
DODOMA
SAMOAN

Those spell contest answer FAR-OFF WORLDS. Perhaps a bit of poetic license since there are no interplanetary birds, but I bet New Zealand, Antarctica, Iceland and such seem like far-off worlds to our feathered friends.

THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:

This week’s contest answer is an eight-letter word whose last letter is A.

NOTE: Due to the late publication, the deadline for this puzzle is Wednesday, June 2nd at noon ET.

Solve well, and be not led astray by words intended to deceive.