Colophon
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The animal featured on the cover of Using csh and tcsh is an oystercatcher, a wading shore bird that is found on every continent but Antarctica. This striking-looking bird has sharply contrasting black and white plumage, scarlet irises, and a long, bright orange bill that is compressed along the sides.
Most oystercatchers form permanent pair bonds. Their breeding grounds are usually a short distance inland from their feeding grounds, and many pairs return to the same breeding ground each spring. The incubation period is 25 to 28 days, with an average of three eggs per clutch. Oystercatchers are unusual among shore birds in that they feed their young for the first six weeks or so. The diet of oystercatchers consists mainly of bivalve mollusks, such as cockles, mussels, and oysters, crabs, periwinkles, lugworms, and earthworms. Chicks learn to hunt for worms as young as six weeks, using the Herbst’s corpuscles, tactile organs on their bills, to locate them in the sand. However, it can take years for an oystercatcher to perfect the technique of opening mollusk shells.
There are two methods of opening mollusk shells: hammering and stabbing. In hammering, the shell is carried to a rock and repeatedly hammered until opened. In stabbing, the oystercatcher uses its long bill to pry open a shell that is agape and to sever the adductor muscles that clamp the shell shut. Individual oystercatchers are either hammerers or stabbers, depending on the method they were taught when young. Similarly, oystercatchers are either mollusk eaters or crab eaters, again depending on their upbringing. Mollusk-eating chicks have been known to be frightened by crabs.
Edie Freedman designed the cover of this book, using a 19th-century engraving from the Dover Pictorial Archive. The cover layout was produced with Quark XPress 3.3 using the ITC Garamond font.
The inside layout was designed by Edie Freedman and Nancy Priest and implemented in gtroff by Lenny Muellner. The text and heading fonts are ITC Garamond Light and Garamond Book. The illustrations that appear in the book were created in Macromedia Freehand 5.0 by Chris Reilley. The colophon was written by Clairemarie Fisher O’Leary. Whenever possible, our books use RepKover™, a durable and flexible lay-flat binding. If the page count exceeds RepKover’s limit, perfect binding is used.