If the VBA approach which you are using from within MS Word is turning out to be slow, then using the same approach from KM will not speed things up (Keyboard Maestro would have to work across the osascript interface, from outside MS Word, which would add some overhead.
You are probably better off either:
- Getting some advice from a VBA forum on what other approaches you could take in VBA, or
- Working directly with the MS Word XML (or possibly, if the document does not involve much special formatting, with a plain text version of the data)
(FWIW If I had the word file and bird list in front of me I might get the two files into the most lightweight format that works (perhaps using Pandoc) and write a script in something like Python to bring the bird list into memory as a hashed dictionary, before mapping a conditional emphasis markup over the list of words in the document)