Page:The Zoologist, 1st series, vol 1 (1843).djvu/254

226 many were my juvenile speculations as to the intention of nature in endowing it with a beak so grotesque and unusual.

Several years afterwards, while examining a fine British specimen, I was struck by the peculiar formation of the tip of the bill, which appeared to me to be so slender and exquisitely delicate as to render it impossible for the bird to thrust it into the sand or mud in search of insects or worms, after the manner of the Tringidae and Scolopacidæ (sandpipers, snipes, woodcocks, &c.) In the latter family (the Scolopacidæ) the tip of the bill is comparatively large, soft, and peculiarly sensitive, and amply furnished with nerves, which render it a delicate organ of touch, and, as Mr. Yarrell observes, proves of the greatest assistance to these birds when boring in the soft sand or mud, by enabling them to detect their food when placed beyond the reach of sight. Now the reverse of this applies to the avocet; the tip of the bill, even in a recently killed specimen, is hard and rather brittle, resembling in appearance a minute portion of very thin whalebone, and scarcely so thick as the point of the finest crowquill pen. I could not help fancying that Nature had therefore turned it upwards, as it were, out of the reach of harm, and allotted to another portion of the beak the duty of searching for and detecting the food of the bird.

I felt strengthened in this opinion from observing that the depression and flattening of the bill throughout the greater part of its length, produced, at the curve, a sharpness of the outer edges of the mandibles, which appeared to me to be precisely of such a form as would render the passing of that part of the bill underneath the sand, by means of a horizontal motion from right to left, and vice versa, an easy and natural operation.

Never having seen this bird in a wild state, although I have passed much time in pursuit of water- fowl on various parts of the sea-coast of Great Britain and Ireland, I had no opportunity of verifying my conjectures until lately, when A.T. Dodd, Esq., of Chichester, an excellent naturalist, to whose zeal and liberality the Museum in that town is indebted for the acquisition of a valuable collection of British birds, favored me with some facts connected with the occurrence of the spoonbill and the avocet in that neighbourhood. Recent specimens of both these birds had been brought to him by an intelligent person of whose accuracy of observation he entertained no doubt, and from whom he learned the following particulars relative to their manner of feeding.

"He had observed that the mode adopted by the spoonbill, was by ploughing the soft sand or mud from side to side, with its bill, to the