“I visited the district of Boyamo on the south side of Cuba in the year 1821, and was on the coast from January to April. I was much among the marshes and swamps about the river Conta, a stream that receives the tidal waters, which here rise and fall six or seven feet, at fifty miles along its course. At the mouth of this river there are long stretches of shoal ground, where the floods of the river and the sea form lakelets, and successively deposit their stores of living atoms, with the rising and falling tides. Here the Flamingoes flock and feed. They arrange themselves in _what seem to be lines_, in consequence of their finding their food along the _edges_ of these shallows; and though it is true that whilst their heads are down, and they are cluttering with their bills in the water, they have one of their number on the watch, standing erect, with his long neck turning round to every point, ready to sound the alarm on the apprehension of danger,—what appears to be a studied distribution of themselves back to back, as some observers describe their arrangement, is nothing but their regardless turning about in their places, inwardly and outwardly, at a time when all are intent on making the most of the stores which the prolific waters are yielding. “The vessel I was with on the coast of Cuba was loading timber. Our raftsmen brought us from Juanita, a town on the Rio Conta to which the tidal influences of the sea extend, a pair of Flamingoes. I was struck with their attitudes, with the excellent adaptation of their two-fold character of waders and swimmers, to their habits, while standing and feeding in the sort of shoal which we made them in a large tub upon deck. We were here able to observe their natural gait and action. With a firm erectness, like a man treading a wine press, they trod and stirred the mashed biscuits, and junked fish, with which we fed them; and plied their long lithe necks, scooping with their heads reversed, and bent inwardly towards their trampling feet. The bill being crooked, and flattened for accommodation to this reversed mode of feeding, when the head is thrust down into the mud-shoals and the sand drifts, the upper bill alone touches the ground. The structure of the tongue, of which Professor Owen has given so minute and interesting a description, is admirably adapted for a mode of feeding altogether peculiar. The spines with which the upper surface is armed, are arranged in an irregular and alternate series, and act with the notches on the edge of the upper mandible, on which they press when the bird feeds with the head reversed. In this reversed position, the weight and size of the tongue becomes a very efficient instrument for entrapping the food. The bird muddles, and clatters the bill, and dabbles about, and the tongue receives and holds as a strainer whatever the water offers of food.