(COMMON SEED-SNIPE.)
+Thinocorus rumicivorus+, _Burm. La-Plata Reise_, ii. p. 501 (Rosario);
_Scl. et Salv. Nomencl._ p. 144; _iid. P. Z. S._ 1868, p. 143
(Buenos Ayres); _Durnford, Ibis_, 1877, p. 42 (Chupat) et p. 197
(Buenos Ayres), et 1878, p. 403 (Centr. Patagonia); _Tacz. Orn.
Pér._ iii. p. 283.
_Description._--Above buffy brown, marbled and irregularly banded
with black; wing-feathers black, edged with white, external
secondaries like the back; tail black, broadly tipped with white,
central rectrices like the back: beneath white; a broad line on each
side of the throat uniting in the centre of the neck and expanding
into a collar on the breast black; sides of neck greyish; bill dark
brown; feet yellow; claws black: whole length 6·5 inches, wing 3·9,
tail 1·9. _Female_: above like the male: beneath white, sides of
neck and breast brown varied with blackish, with slight traces only
of the black bar.
_Hab._ Western Peru, Bolivia, Chili, Patagonia, and Argentina.
This curious bird has the grey upper plumage and narrow, long,
sharply-pointed wings of a Snipe, with the plump body and short strong
curved beak of a Partridge. But the gallinaceous beak is not in this
species correlated, as in the Partridges, with stout rasorial feet; on
the contrary, the legs and feet are extremely small and feeble, and
scarcely able to sustain the weight of the body. When alighting the
Seed-Snipe drops its body directly upon the ground and sits close like
a Goatsucker; when rising it rushes suddenly away with the wild hurried
flight and sharp scraping alarm-cry of a Snipe. It is exclusively a
vegetable-feeder. I have opened the gizzards of many scores to satisfy
myself that they never eat insects, and have found nothing in them but
seed (usually clover-seed) and tender buds and leaves mixed with minute
particles of gravel.
These birds inhabit Patagonia, migrating north to the pampas in winter,
where they arrive in April. They usually go in flocks of about forty or
fifty individuals, and fly rapidly, keeping very close together. On the
ground, however, they are always much scattered, and are so reluctant
to rise that they will allow a person to walk or ride through the flock
without taking wing, each bird creeping into a little hollow in the
surface or behind a tuft of grass to escape observation. During
its winter sojourn on the pampas the flock always selects as a
feeding-ground a patch of whitish argillaceous earth, with a scanty
withered vegetation; and here when the birds crouch motionless on the
ground, to which their grey plumage so closely assimilates in colour,
it is most difficult to detect them. If a person stands still close to
or in the midst of the flock the birds will presently betray their
presence by answering each other with a variety of strange notes,
resembling the cooing of Pigeons, loud taps on a hollow ground, and
other mysterious sounds, which seem to come from beneath the earth.
In the valley of Rio Negro I met with a few of these birds in summer,
but could not find their nests.
Durnford, however, who found them breeding in Chupat at the end of
October, tells us that the nest is a slight depression in the ground,
sometimes lined with a few blades of grass. "The eggs have a pale stone
ground-colour, very thickly but finely speckled with light and dark
chocolate markings; they have a polished appearance, and measure
1·3 × ·8 inch" (Ibis, 1878, p. 403).