Pied avocet
Recurvirostra avosetta
— Where the name comes from
Recurvirostra means “bill bent backwards”, and it is an exact description of a tool that points up rather than down. Avosetta is Italian’s gift to science: it was the bird’s name in the Venetian lagoons, collected by sixteenth-century naturalists and adopted by Linnaeus as it stood.
— Facts
- Group
- Birds · Aves
- Order
- Shorebirds
- Habitat
- Saltpans, brackish lagoons, coastal mudflats, fish ponds
- Range
- Europe, Central Asia and Africa
- Size
- 42–46 cm, wingspan 67–77 cm, 250–400 g
- Diet
- Crustaceans, insect larvae, worms sieved from the mud
- Lifespan
- 24 years in the wild
— Characteristics
- 01
It scythes shallow water, sweeping the bill from side to side.
- 02
Chicks hatch with a straight bill: the curve comes over the following weeks.
- 03
It nests in noisy colonies that see off predators together.
— What sets it apart
It had been gone from Britain for a century when, in 1947, a few pairs returned to nest on the Suffolk coast: during the war that ground had been deliberately flooded to hinder a German landing, and out of it had come exactly the brackish lagoons the species needed. The return was so remarkable that Britain’s principal bird society took the avocet as its emblem. It is a bird that came back thanks to an anti-invasion defence.
