9120 Birds. 
speckled, confused mass; then, as they wheel from the spectator, the soft pink colours 
of their backs and wing-coverts absorb all other hues, and, screaming with outstretched 
necks, they fly off, an animated, rosy cloud. It is the most gorgeous sight on which 
the naturalist’s eyes can feast. The flamingos are most difficult of approach; and it is 
only by a chance flock crossing overhead that a shot can be obtained. But, though 
the flamingos have gone ou the first alarm, myriads of birds remain; ducks are swim- 
ming literally en masse; clouds of the pretty white-winged black tern are playing 
overhead, and making feints almost within reach; while the beautiful blackwinged 
stilt, the tamest of waders, daintily lifts his long pink legs as he gracefully stalks 
through the shallows, or more hurriedly leaves the nests which are most profusely 
scattered round us, unprotected and unconcealed amid the mud and grass. The 
opposite side of the lake is bordered by a mass of tall reeds, into the recesses of which 
the water hens and purple gallinules are hurrying, and from whose thickets resounds 
the harsh note of the great sedge warbler or thrush nightingale, mingled with the 
gentler strains of many lesser aquatic warblers. On all sides of us the collared pratin- 
cole is exercising its arts, like the lapwing, to lure us from the eggs which lie scattered 
on the hard dried mud, dropped by threes into any chance camel’s footmark; and 
groups of little Kentish plovers are running rapidly by the water’s edge—Tvistram’s 
* Great Suhara, p. 62. 
Shoveller near Beverley.—On the 15th of April a male of this species, in full adult 
plumage, was shot by-Mr. Kemp, gamekeeper, of Skerne, near Driffield, on the River 
Hull, near to a place called Brigham. The bird was alone. I had it in the flesh, and 
on dissection found, as-I had anticipated, the gizzard was modified and beautifully 
adapted to the bird’s peculiar habits and food. The organ was relatively small in 
proportion to the size of the bird and to the gizzard in other species of this great 
family. I attribute this relative inferiority in the dimensions of the organ to the 
modification of its parts, powers and functions. Most of the ducks feed more or less 
upon grain, grasses, seeds and vegetable matters generally, and in consequence the 
muscular walls of their gizzards are immensely developed, in order to render the organ 
capable of pulping its contents by mechanical force; but in this species I found the 
muscular walls of the gizzard comparatively thin and feeble in their development. 
The ventriculus succenturiatus was considerably dilated and proportionally larger and 
more highly developed than in those specimens of the other ducks I have had the 
opportunity of examining, and indeed the whole organ approximated more closely to 
the compound stomach of the mergansers, &c., than that of any bird I have dissected. 
The form and arrangement of parts in the organ itself bespeak the natural food of the 
bird, viz. insects, which are searched for, captured, and separated from water, weed 
and mud by the deeply fringed or pectinated bill. When received into the stomach 
the food is digested partly by the action of natural solvents, and partly by mechanical 
grinding force. The bill itself is a very beautiful provision of Nature for finding and 
securing the bird's necessary food. I believe it to be endowed with exquisite powers of 
sensibility, and imagine that by means of this sensibility the bird finds its prey, rather 
than by means of the senses of smell and sight, which appear to be only secondary 
auxiliaries in detecting the food. The broadly expanded convexity of the lower third 
of the bill is dotted over with minute depressions, which I believe correspond to an 
equal number of nervous filaments of seusation, brought at these points very near to 
the surface,-as in the snipe and other birds which hunt for their prey in like manner. 
The unusual breadth of the bill affords space for a greater number of nervous filaments, 
