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. HOW ANIMAL VOICES SOUND TO FOREIGN EARS [Illustration] When in El Salvador in 1951, I found that the common barnyard animals had much the same voices as the ones with which I was familiar in the United States. But when I saw their utterances written down it was another matter. The voices written in Spanish sometimes looked as different as the names of the animals written in Spanish. Take the donkey, for example (or _burro_, as they call it in Spanish). In English we call its "song" "Heehaw!" In Spanish they wrote it for me, "Aja! Aja! Ija! Ija!" There were a number of German scientists at the Instituto Tropical de Investigaciones Científicas, where I was working, and for comparison I asked them to write for me what the same animals said in German. The burro (_Esel_, they call it in German) says, "_Ihå! Ihå!_" in German. Despite the difference in the appearance of these words, when they were pronounced by the various nationalities they sounded very similar. Compared with the original assinine pronunciation, the Spanish version was awarded the prize for being the best rendition of the beast's voice. The cat's "_Miau, miau, miau_" in Spanish, "_Miau, miau_" in German, and "Meow" in English were all very similar in appearance as well as sound. The duck's voice came out differently. In Spanish it was "_Cuá, cuá, cuá_," in German "_Wack, wack_," and in English the initial "Cu" or "Q" sound of the Spanish, and the final "k" sound of the German are united into "quack." The hoot owl came out much the same in pronunciation, though it looked different in the Spanish "_Ju_," in German "_Hu_," and in English "Who."