A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
ibis
An ibis is a long-legged wading bird with a long thin bill curved smoothly downward, used to probe soft mud and shallow water by feel. Around thirty species range across the warmer parts of every continent except Antarctica. They feed in flocks, fly in lines with the neck extended and quick shallow wingbeats alternating with glides, and roost communally in trees.
Etymology
The word came into English from Latin, which had it from Greek, and the Greeks appear to have taken it from Egyptian. It is one of a small handful of English words that can be traced back to ancient Egyptian, and it arrived attached to the sacred ibis, which the Egyptians associated with Thoth, the god of writing, counting, and judgment.
Notes
The scale of that association is hard to take in. Millions of mummified ibises have been recovered from Egyptian catacombs, at Saqqara and Tuna el-Gebel, offered by pilgrims over centuries. The bird was gone from Egypt entirely by the nineteenth century and now breeds mostly south of the Sahara. In Australia, the white ibis has moved into cities so thoroughly that it has acquired a set of impolite local nicknames.