HABITS OF THE AVOCET. 
145 
The bird is also very elegant in its form, and of beautiful, but not gaudy colours. 
All its outlines are curves of the most graceful flexure; and though the legs are 
stout for the size of the body, and the tibiae, or thigh bones, remarkably free, so 
as to allow a large step, yet their insertions fall in well with the outline of the 
under part of the bird. The plumage is remarkably compact, such as we meet 
with in birds decidedly aquatic; and the colours are exceedingly pure. They are 
black and white, variously marked, but never broken into each other; so that 
their contrast shews to the greatest possible advantage. White, of the most 
snowy intensity, is the ground or prevailing colour of the whole plumage. The 
upper part of the head and the nape are deep black, relieved by a row of well- 
defined white spots backwards from the eye, and sometimes, but not always, with 
a white spot on the forehead. The scapulars, the bastard wing, a portion of the 
turn of the wing, and the quills, with their middle coverts, are, in general, also 
deep black; but the extent of the black is scarcely the same in any two specimens, 
though it and the white are always of equal purity. The naked parts of the legs, 
which extend very considerably higher than the tarsal joints, are blackish blue; 
the bill is black, and the irides of the eyes are hazel. The bill is rather firmer 
than that of the Snipes and Woodcocks, which, amongst the land-birds, may be 
considered as bearing the nearest similitude to the Avocet; but there is no doubt 
that it is an organ of touch. It is covered with a papillous membrane, and 
copiously supplied both with nerves and with blood-vessels. Its curvature up¬ 
ward, differing from that of any other birds with which we are familiar, has 
sometimes given occasion to those who are incapable of looking at the use as well 
as the form, to describe the Avocet as one of Nature’s unfortunates.” But 
Nature has no unfortunates, excepting those human beings who, by their miscon¬ 
duct, make misfortune their own; and when we come to examine the Avocet 
upon its proper feeding grounds, and to discover that there is food for a bird there 
which no bill, except one formed like that of the Avocet, could collect, we are as 
powerfully constrained to admire the perfect adaptation of this bill as of any one 
organ in the animal kingdom. 
I have said that the Avocet is the last bird upon the land; and in truth we 
can hardly say that its pasture is there. Nec tellus est, nec mare ^—^not the land, 
not the water, but the debris of the land passing onward, until the reflux of the 
tidal wave shall fling it back again. When sea-tides or land-floods ebb away, 
there is a deposit of fresh mud made during the pause of tranquillity, which in¬ 
variably takes place between the rise and the fall. In this mud there is a count¬ 
less multitude of small animals in the rudimental or in the mature state. When 
this mud remains quiescent in the shallows, it becomes the proper pasture of the 
dabbling Ducks; but it does not always so remain; for water working over a 
