Can I help you a little today? Today's puzzle - "Fairy Tale of birds" - is not immediately clear, even if you are familiar with what it is referring to.

Below we've compiled some useful tips for Strand#78 and the answer to that. We'll start with a few clues before building the full answer for Strand #78, so read on if you need a little help.

Warning: Spoilers are ahead for Strand #78.  

The official theme of NYT Strand #78 is... "The Fairy Tale of the Birds"

And here is an unofficial tip from me: "A story from Hans Christian Anderson."

If you're still in the dark, here are some useful words to give those valuable clue tokens:

Still struggling? Spangram will give you tips about connecting words. Today, it starts with 'U' and ends with 'G'.

Scroll down to find out what it is...

It's an ugly duckling.

So what is the answer for today's strand in game #78?

Drum roll, please...

...And the spangram was an ugly duckling.

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hi chain. I don't really know what I'm doing with this. All the words in Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tale "The Ugly Duckling" are characteristic, but it all feels a little sparse in the same way. 

Nevertheless, I got over it without a clue, which means it wasn't too bad.

It helped that the journey was spelled reasonably easily in the upper left corner, and that misfit was immediately on its right. 

Beautiful rolled around under these two and it made me see "ugly" on the right. When it did nothing, I realized it was UGLYDUCKLING, part of today's spangram. 

Now I knew what a unified word is, it was not so difficult to find the last few. The misfit was the only answer left on the top half of the board, and Swan was supposed to be in the mix, given that it was the main feature of the story. 

With them in place, all that remained was to tap the reflection around the Swan for a reasonably easy win.

Are you reading this in a later time zone? You can find the full article of yesterday's Strand answer for game #77 right here.