[122] “Length from beak to toes extended 62 inches, expanse 57¹⁄₂, tail 5¹⁄₂, beak 5¹⁄₂, neck 23, leg [tarsus] 11, middle toe 3, hind toe ¹⁄₂.”—(_Rob. MSS._) The dimensions given below are from a specimen shot on the beach at Negril, in March 1764; from the Doctor’s description, it seems to have been scarcely mature. He adds, “I once saw a living one at Kingston. Its food was white bread steeped in water in a washing basin. In feeding, it immerged its upper mandible in the bottom of the basin, resting on the elbow or angle of that mandible, and by quick repeated motions, like those of a duck in the mud, sucked up the finest parts of the dissolving bread.” As I have never met with this beautiful bird in Jamaica, I am the more obliged for the following memoir from the pen of my kind friend, Mr. Hill. “I believe the Flamingo is never seen now upon our coasts, but as a solitary bird, or, at most, associated with three or four companions, when they make excursions in small groups, preparatory to pairing and breeding. The congregated flocks of the neighbouring islands disperse themselves; and stragglers appear upon the sand-bars at the mouths of our rivers, occasionally, in seasons remarkable for visits of the Hyperborean and the Canada Goose. We are best acquainted with them as inhabitants of Cuba. The waters between the thinly peopled shores of that island, and the clustered green kays of the coast, to which Columbus gave the names of the Gardens of the King and Queen, are low and shoaly. In these shallow seas, in adjacent swamps, in river-lakes, in marshes and lagoons, and salina-ponds, they are to be always seen moving in flocks, or flying and feeding in ranks of two and three hundred together. Their lengthened lines and red plumage have led the colonial Spaniards to call them _English soldiers_, a name not inappropriate to birds that marshal themselves under a leader, and regulate their movements by signals, when the remotest danger threatens; and obey the bugle-blast of their sentinel, when he summons the cohorts to the wing, and to betake themselves to other feeding-grounds.