SHOVELLER, 48 1 



marked than this. The excellence of its flesh, which is uniformly 

 juicy, tender, and well tasted, is another recommendation to 

 which it is equally entitled. It occasionally visits the sea- 

 coast, but is more commonly 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 larvae 

 of insects, sifting the watery mud through the long and finely- 

 set teeth of its curious bill, which is admirably constructed 

 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, fit- 

 ting 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 correspon- 

 dent of Buffon, breeds yearly in the marshes in France. The 

 female is said to make her nest on the ground with withered 

 grass, in the midst of the largest tufts of rushes or coarse 

 herbnge, in the most inaccessible part of the slaky marsh, and 

 lays ten or twelve pale rust-coloured 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 colours until after the second moult. 



The blue-winged shoveller is twenty inches long, and two 

 feet six inches in extent ; the bill is brownish black, three 

 inches in length, greatly widened near the extremity, closely 

 pectinated on the sides, and furnished with a nail on the tip 



this membrane a subgenus, malacorhynclius, 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 genus coming 

 near to the petrels, and phoenicopterus of Flamingo. — Ed. 



VOL. II. 2 H 



