There is a bird called the YBIS (Ibis) which cleans out its bowels with its own beak. It enjoys eating corpses or snakes’ eggs, and from such things it takes food home for its young, which comes most acceptable. It walks about near the seashore by day and night, looking for little dead fish or other bodies which have been thrown up by the waves. It is afraid to enter the water because it cannot swim.
- The Book of Beasts : Being a Translation from a Latin Bestiary of the Twelfth Century Made and Edited by T. H. White (1954).
Wow. I’ll never read one of these while eating spaghetti, ever again.