SHOVELLER. 
87 
elegantly marked than this. The excellence of its flesh, which 
is uniformly juicy, tender, and well tasted, is another recom- 
mendation 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 construct- 
ed for the purpose, being large, to receive a considerable quan- 
tity of matter, each mandible bordered with close-set, pectina- 
ted rows, exactly resembling those of a weaver’s reed, which, 
fitting into each other, form a kind of sieve, capable of retain- 
ing 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 correspond- 
ent 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 herb- 
age, 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 pecti- 
nated on the sides, and furnished with a nail on the tip of each 
Mr Swainson has formed on account of this membrane a suh-genus, malacorhyn- 
chus, hut 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 peterels, 
and phcenicopterus of Flamingo. — En. 
