icxixoxouhqui.

ICXI-XOXOUHQU, American Avocet (Recurvirostra americana) [FC: 34 Ixixoxouhquj] “It is a waterfowl. It is named icxixoxouhqui because its legs are green. Its bill is small and cylindrical, small and slender, black, curved upward. Its head is quite small, white; it is rather long-necked. Its breast, its back are white; its tail is also white. Quite small are its wings; the upper surfaces are black, and the under surfaces quite white; its wing-bends have black placed on both surfaces. And when it has shed, its head and neck are almost chili-red, reaching to its wing-bends. It raises its young here, two or four young, when the rains come…. And it… leaves when [the other water] birds migrate.” This is a definitive description of the American Avocet.
Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain; Book 11 – Earthly Things, no. 14, Part XII, eds. and transl. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble (Santa Fe and Salt Lake City: School of American Research and the University of Utah, 1963); and, with quotation selections, synthesis, and analysis here also appearing in E. S. Hunn, "The Aztec Fascination with Birds: Deciphering Sixteenth-Century Sources," unpublished manuscript, 2022, cited here with permission.

The Florentine Codex includes a painting of this bird in Book 11, folio 35r.
Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 11: Earthly Things", fol. 35r, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/11/folio/35r/images/0 Accessed 17 October 2025.