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Hi Demeter, It's the same bird we had a few weeks ago. Cell I should already have changed from C to G...

Ah of course. Thanks Meursault.

OK, across clues done. A couple of downs I need help with:

5d - Banana regularly chopped for ignorant girl (4). (I think ignorant is the extra word)

20d Half of twenty infantrymen maybe betrayed (4)

(I have a copy of Bradford and the Chambers equivalent, if anyone wants to refer me to either of those).

Thanks in advance for the help.

5d b an a na = anna
20d soldiers -iers = sold

I thought 5d was ANNA but how does "regularly chopped" indicate removing the B and A?

If 'chopped' is interpreted as 'omitted', then every nth letter has been omitted. In this case n=3, and the chopping starts with the first : NB these variables are arbitrary; another clue might use n=2 and start the chopping from the second letter, etc etc.

I made that harder than it needed to be by making the scary women Amazons (something to do with cutting maize which I had not properly thought through and then could not see my mistake) and following the preamble to the letter by not implementing the instruction until I had all the grid entries.
Still a very hard puzzle. One of the best this year.
The end game reminded me a little of the Oozlum bird we met a couple of years ago - though flying in the opposite direction.

I have a full grid and have traced the last six words from the first line of the poem. But I cannot see any consecutive letters for the first word.
Have I made a mistake somewhere ,or have I missed something obvious ? The six words I have start in column 6, row 4.
I'd be very grateful for any help.
Thanks.

Sorry...forget my post..I have now found my error ! I had forgotten to write in the change of letter in the central box. Phew, what a relief !
What a great puzzle.

I've already put my entry into the mail with a completely filled-in grid, but two things still don't work out for me.

One has already been mentioned: I can find only one plausible answer for 17ac, but I cannot figure out how to justify the wordplay in Chambers. Other dictionaries do list the needed abbreviation, but if Chambers does as well, I haven't found where.

The other concerns 44ac. There are two unchecked cells, and even after figuring out where the other five letters go in the jumble, I can't see how there could be any possible way of settling which of the remaining two letters should go in which unchecked cell. Therefore, if I'm interpreting the preamble correctly, after we have filled in as much of the grid as possible, those two cells are still empty. Then we follow the instruction obtained from the across clues, and when we're done with that, those two cells are still empty.

(To be honest, those are not the only two cells that are still empty for me after filling in as much of the grid as seems to me to be possible. But with the rest of the grid, it may be that there's a subtle logical path that I just haven't found yet; with 44ac, it seems evident that there cannot possibly be any chain of reasoning that will make it possible to decide which letter goes in which unchecked cell.)

Yet the preamble says that, by following the instruction from the across clues, we are "thus resolving or overriding the initial ambiguities". But here is at least one ambiguity that, at least as far as I can see, is neither resolved nor overridden. At the same time, it seems perfectly clear what letters should end up in those two cells. I just can't see how following the instructions gets those letters into their cells.

So the preamble itself seems to me to contain a sizable ambiguity that I'm unable to either resolve or override. As I said, I've already submitted my entry with every cell filled. I reasoned that if the correct answer involved leaving some cells empty, surely the preamble would have to refer to resolving only some of the initial ambiguities.

Are others seeing something here that I'm missing?