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Big Bird is the main protagonist of the children's television show Sesame Street which airs on PBS. Big Bird, like many of the other Sesame Street characters, is a Muppet character. He is sometimes referred to simply as "Bird" by his friends.[2]
Officially performed by Caroll Spinney since 1969, he is an eight-foot two-inch tall bright yellow bird.[3] He can roller skate, ice skate, dance, sing, write poetry, draw and even ride a unicycle. But despite this wide array of talents, he is prone to frequent misunderstandings, on one occasion even singing the alphabet as one big long word (ABC-DEF-GHI), pondering what it could ever mean.[4] He lives in a large nest behind the 123 Sesame Street brownstone and he has a teddy bear named Radar, after Walter "Radar" O'Reilly of M*A*S*H, who had a teddy bear and was also lovably naive and innocent. Radar was given to Big Bird by Gary Burghoff when he guest starred on the show.[5][6] Later on, however, it was said that Big Bird got the bear as a gift from Mr. Hooper.[citation needed]