[Illustration]
We not only wash ourselves and our clothes, but certain items of our
food are regularly washed, as spinach, to get the sand out of it.
Washing has been so important in our society that we've coined the term
"Cleanliness is next to godliness." Possibly we've the snobbish idea
it's a strictly human trait. Among other animals we don't expect to
find water used for such cleanliness, and the raccoon, who does wash
his food, is considered a sort of biological oddity.
But when we come to birds we find a surprising number of them that wash
their food.
The dipper of our Western mountains in Oregon has been seen to wash
insects and grubs before feeding them to the young birds. The parents
held the food crosswise in the bill and the head was twisted rapidly
from side to side in the water. Not until then was the food taken to
the nest for the young.
The scene shifts to Africa. Four buff-backed herons were feeding on
a flooded lawn at Gezira, Egypt. One of the birds captured a large
insect, apparently a large black beetle. Holding the insect in the tip
of its bill, the bird walked to the water, immersed the beetle three
times, shaking and fumbling with it the while, and then swallowing it.
Then in Britain came a whole host of records, after an observation
in Holland in 1946 of curlew sandpipers washing food. The birds were
probing the dry mud at the edge of a little creek. When one of the
birds got a small sand worm, it at once ran with quick steps to the
creek and stepped into the shallow water, where it dipped the worm a
few times into the water before swallowing it. Then it trotted away
for more. The editor of _British Birds_, the journal in which this was
published, suggested that this might be a more common habit than the
scanty published records would indicate, and invited observations.
A spate of records resulted in the succeeding numbers of the journal:
a whimbrel washing crabs; a snipe, earthworms; godwits washing their
food; with curlews it was reported to be normal; dunlins, greenshanks,
redshanks, ringed plover, and oyster catchers were all reported doing
this until it appears that with the group of birds we call shore
birds--sandpipers, snipes, plovers, and their relatives--it may indeed
be normal. The details of the observations strongly suggest that the
reason for the washing, in many cases at least, is the same one that
underlies our washing spinach; to get the sand and mud out of it.