A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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spoonbill
A spoonbill is a tall wading bird with a long bill flattened and widened into a spatula at the tip. It feeds by sweeping the bill side to side through shallow water with the tip slightly open, snapping shut on anything it touches, so it works by feel and can feed at night and in water too muddy to see through. Six species range across the warmer parts of the world.
Etymology
The English name is plain description and most languages arrived at the same one. The Latin genus name means, roughly, spoon, from the Greek. The bird is related to the ibises and the two families share the same general build and the same habit of feeding by touch rather than sight.
Notes
The roseate spoonbill of the Americas is pink for the same reason a flamingo is: pigments taken up from the crustaceans it eats. It was hunted almost out of Florida in the plume trade, since the wings were made into fans, and its recovery came alongside the egret’s. Spoonbill bills carry dense nerve endings in the flattened tip, which is what makes the sweeping method work.