578 SHOVELLER. 
than this. The excellence of its flesh, wh:.h is uniformly juicy, 
tender, and well tasted, is another recommendation to which it 1s 
equally entitled. It occasionally visits the sea-coast, but is more comi- 
monly found on our lakes and rivers, particularly along their muddy 
shores, where it spends great part of its time in searching for small 
worms, and the larve of insects, sifting the watery mud through the 
long and finely-set teeth of its curious bill, which is admirably con- 
structed for the purpose, being large, to receive a considerable quantity 
of matter, each mandible bordered with close-set, pectinated rows, 
exactly resembling those of a weaver’s reed, which, fitting into each 
other, form a kind of sieve, capable of retaining very minute worms, 
seeds, or insects, which constitute the principal food of the bird. 
The Shoveller visits us only in the winter, and is not known to 
breed in any part of the United States. It is a common bird of Europe, 
and, according to M. Baillon, the correspondent of Buffon, breeds 
yearly in the marshes in France. The female is said to make her nest 
on the gronnd, with withered grass, in the midst of the largest tufts of 
rushes or coarse herbage, in the most inaccessible part of the slaky 
marsh, and lays ten or twelve pale rust colored eggs; the young, as 
soon as hatched, are conducted to the water by the parent birds. 
They are said to be at first very shapeless and ugly, for the bill is then 
as broad as the body, and seems too great a weight for the little bird 
to carry. ‘Their plumage does not acquire its full colors until after 
the second moult. 
The Blue-winged Shoveller is twenty inches long, and two feet six 
inches in extent; the bill 1s brownish black, three inches in length, 
greatly widened near the extremity, closely pectinated on the sides, 
and furnished with a nail on the tip of each mandible; irides, bright 
orange ; tungue, large and fleshy ; the inside of the upper and outside 
of the lower mandible are grooved, so as to receive distinctly the long, 
separated, reedlike teeth; there is also a gibbosity in the two mandi- 
bles, which do not meet at the sides, and this vacuity is occupied by 
the sifters just mentioned; head and upper half of the neck, glossy, 
changeable green; rest of the neck and breast, white, passing round 
and nearly meeting above; whole belly, dark reddish chestnut ; flanks, 
a brownish yellow, pencilled traversely with black, between which 
and the vent, which is black, is a band of white ; back, blackish brown; 
exterior edges of the scapulars, white ; lesser wing-coverts, and some 
of the tertials, a fine light sky blue; beauty spot on the wing, a 
ranted in taking the bill as our criterion, and those birds where we find its structure 
most fully developed for the type. These are most decidedly to be seen in the 
Shovellers, a group containing, as yet, only three or four known species; in them 
we have the utmost dilatation of the bill towards its apex, and the laminz upon its 
edges, and Jong and remarkably delicate. The bird itself possesses a powerful 
flight, and is a most expert diver and swimmer, but seems to prefer inland lakes or 
fens to the more open seas and rivers. 
To this group will belong the curious Pink-eared Shoveller, from New Holland 
remarkable from the tooth-like membrane pinjecting from the angles of the bill, and 
differing somewhat from the others in its hrown anc dusky plumage. Mr. Swain- 
son has formed on account of this membrane a sub-genus, malacorhynchus, but in 
which I am hardly yet prepared to coincide. 
It may be mentioned here, that the only birds which possess the lamellated 
structure of the upper mandible is pachyptila, a gents coming near to the Petcrels, 
and phenicopterus of Flamingo. — Ep. 
