Description
Adult plumage is virtually all scarlet. The feathers may show various tints and shades, but only the tips of their wings deviate from their namesake color. A small but reliable marking, these wingtips are a rich inky black (or occasionally dark blue) and are found only on the longest primaries – otherwise the birds' coloration is "a vivid orange-red, almost luminous in quality." Scarlet ibises have red bills and feet however the bill is sometimes blackish, especially toward the end. They closely resemble herons and have a long, narrow, de-curved, or wide spatulate bill. Their legs and neck are long and extended in flight.
A juvenile Scarlet Ibis is a mix of grey, brown, and white. As it grows, a heavy diet of red crustaceans produces the scarlet coloration. The color change begins with the juvenile's second moult, around the time it begins to fly: the change starts on the back and spreads gradually across the body while increasing in intensity over a period of about two years. The Scarlet Ibis is the only shorebird with red coloration in the world.
Adults are 55–63 centimetres (22–25 in) long, and the males, slightly larger than females, typically weigh about 1.4 kilograms (3.1 lb). Their bills are also on average around 22% longer than those of females. The life span of the Scarlet Ibis is approximately sixteen years in the wild and twenty years in captivity. An adult Scarlet Ibis has a wingspan of around 54 centimetres (21 in). Though it spends most of its time on foot or wading through water, the bird is a very strong flyer: they are highly migratory and easily capable of long-distance flight. They move as flocks in a classic V formation.
Read more about this topic: Scarlet Ibis
Famous quotes containing the word description:
“Everything to which we concede existence is a posit from the standpoint of a description of the theory-building process, and simultaneously real from the standpoint of the theory that is being built. Nor let us look down on the standpoint of the theory as make-believe; for we can never do better than occupy the standpoint of some theory or other, the best we can muster at the time.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“I was here first introduced to Joe.... He was a good-looking Indian, twenty-four years old, apparently of unmixed blood, short and stout, with a broad face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more turned up at the outer corners than ours, answering to the description of his race. Besides his underclothing, he wore a red flannel shirt, woolen pants, and a black Kossuth hat, the ordinary dress of the lumberman, and, to a considerable extent, of the Penobscot Indian.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The great object in life is Sensation—to feel that we exist, even though in pain; it is this “craving void” which drives us to gaming, to battle, to travel, to intemperate but keenly felt pursuits of every description whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)