oyster-catcher

• “Imagine this picture with oyster-catcher (Haematopus) colors (red-and-yellow stripes on the crest) and you've got the acrylic version.”

  Life's Time Capsule: Pterosaur Gallery

• “The red-bill is, I believe, identical with the oyster-catcher of the Cornish coast.”

  A First Year in Canterbury Settlement

• “The purple-breasted and white-headed fruit-pigeons, pied oyster-catcher, masked and golden plover and the plumed egret have not been seen for years, and among the sea-birds the lesser crested, sooty and bridled terns find no place at date.”

  Last Leaves from Dunk Island

• “Along the shore, too, there is life; guillemot, oyster-catcher, tern are busy there; the wagtail is out in search of food, advancing in little spurts, trim and pert with its pointed beak and swift little flick of a tail; after a while it flies up to perch on a fence and sing with the rest.”

  A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings

• “Here a few terns rear their young, and succeeding generations of the sooty oyster-catcher lay their eggs just out of the reach of high-tide.”

  The Confessions of a Beachcomber

• “This was the sea-birds 'country: snipe, oyster-catcher, dunlin, and terns strewn in small pattering groups at the edge of the sea, where the long ripples ran towards the land and broke in long curving ruffs round the little humps of sand.”

  My Family and Other Animals

• “I never tire of watching how the lonely white heron spears his scaly prey, how the clapper-rail floats on his raft of matted rushes, how the marsh-wren jerks his saucy little tail over his bottle-shaped nest, or how with quick and certain stroke the oyster-catcher extracts the juicy”

  Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 17, No. 097, January, 1876

• “I should have guessed that he was a professional oyster-catcher also, -- a human dredge, employed chiefly at the bottom of the sea.”

  The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 07, No. 40, February, 1861

• “While I was employed upon the island with the theodolite Mr. Hunter, my companion, shot seven or eight brace of birds: they were of two kinds; one a species of oyster-catcher and the other a sandpiper.”

  Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 — Volume 1

• “The pied oyster-catcher receives its name from the circumstance of feeding on oysters and limpets, and its bill is so well adapted to the purpose of forcing asunder the valves of the one, and of raising the other from the rock, that "the Author of Nature," as Derham says, "seems to have framed it purely for that use.”

  The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction Volume 14, No. 379, July 4, 1829

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