Shouldershotten, a. Strained in the shoulder.
Shoulderslip, s. Dislocation of the shoulder.
Shoveller, s. A bird of the duck tribe.
Blue Wing Shoveller, Kertlucock, or Broad Bill (Anas Clypeata, Linn.; Le Souchet, Buff.)—The shoveller is less than the wild duck, commonly weighing about twenty-two ounces, and measuring twenty-one inches in length. The bill is black, three inches long, very broad or spread out, and rounded like a spoon at the end, with the nail hooked inward, and small.
The female is smaller than the male, from which she also differs greatly in the colours of her plumage, the coverts and spangle-spot on her wings being less brilliant, and the other parts composed of white, grey, and rusty, crossed with curved dusky lines, giving her much the appearance of the common wild duck. She makes her nest, lined with withered grasses, on the ground, in the midst of the largest tufts of rushes or coarse herbage, in the most inaccessible parts of the shaky marsh. She lays ten or twelve pale, rusty-coloured eggs; and as soon as the young are hatched, they are conducted to the water by the parent birds, who watch and guard them with the greatest care.
They are at first very shapeless and ugly, for the bill is then almost as broad as the body, and seems too great a weight for the little bird to carry. Their plumage does not acquire its full colours until after the second moult.
It has not yet been ascertained whether the shoveller breeds in England, where, indeed, it is a scarce bird.
This species is of so wild, shy, and solitary a disposition, that all attempts hitherto made to domesticate them have failed.
The anas muscaria of Linnæus (Le Souchet à ventre blanc of Brisson) differs only from this in having the belly white, and is considered merely as a variety of the same species.