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Updated: June 1, 2025
Length from eighteen to twenty-three inches, the difference being due to the tail of the male, which in summer has the middle feathers eight or nine inches long. This Duck differs more in summer and winter plumages than any other. In winter, the only season it is seen in the United States, the male varied with black, white, and silvery-gray, the bill orange and black.
As, however, plumes would probably be inconvenient and certainly of no use during the winter, it is possible that the habit of moulting twice in the year may have been gradually acquired through natural selection for the sake of casting off inconvenient ornaments during the winter. But this view cannot be extended to the many waders, whose summer and winter plumages differ very little in colour.
There is also a great difference with many birds in the length of time during which the two annual plumages are retained; so that the one might come to be retained for the whole year, and the other completely lost. Thus in the spring Machetes pugnax retains his ruff for barely two months. Most species, which undergo a double moult, keep their ornamental feathers for about six months.
In the course of them she was like some impassioned bird of brilliant plumages, tossing her feathers, fluttering behind the bars of her cage at some impertinent, teasing passer-by. She stood there now in the doorway, gesticulating with her hands. "Nu, Tznaiesh schto? Michael Alexandrovitch has put me off says he is busy all night at the office. He busy all night!
The silences and middays like to this, which have passed before the eyes of these giants ambushed in their colonnades who could count them? High above us, lost in the incandescent blue, soar the birds of prey and they were there in the times of the Pharaohs, displaying in the air identical plumages, uttering the same cries.
A few fall victims to the numerous gunners who frequent the shores during the autumn and winter, and consequently it occasionally makes its appearance in the market, where I believe it often passes for a Golden Plover, especially in the case of young birds on their first arrival in November; but for the sake of the unknowing in such matters, I may say that they need never be deceived, as the Grey Plover has a hind toe, and also has the axillary plume or the longish feathers under the wing black, while the Golden Plover has no hind toe and the axillary plume white: a little attention to these distinctions, which hold good at all ages and in all plumages, may occasionally save a certain amount of disappointment at dinner time, as the Grey Plover is apt to taste muddy and fishy, and is by no means so good as the Golden Plover.
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