Ornithological and Other Oddities 



happy parents did their best to bully and intimi- 

 date the other inhabitants of the great aviary, 

 to say nothing of their keepers, but owing to 

 their clumsiness they did little harm. When, 

 however, the chaja does get a blow home it 

 can make it tell, and a half-grown bird has been 

 known to beat off a dog. 



It must be mentioned that these wing-spurs 

 have nothing to do with the claws sometimes 

 present on the wings of birds ; these last are 

 situated at the ends of the fingers, and seem 

 to be of no use, except in the young of the 

 hoatzin {Opisthocomus koazin), which climbs with 

 its wings as well as its feet, being practically 

 a quadruped in its nestling stage. The spurs 

 of the wings are annually shed in some cases, 

 as in the " water - pheasant," which has mere 

 horny pimples in winter. 



The better known leg-spurs, however, are 

 always permanent ; in structure they resemble 

 the horns of cattle, consisting of a bony core 

 clad in a sheath of horn ; and, just as such 

 horns are confined to the members of the bovine 

 family, oxen, sheep, and antelopes, so are leg- 

 spurs only found in the family of pheasants, 

 and not in all of those, being absent in most 

 of the partridges and quails, which belong to 

 the same natural group. The finest spurs, in 

 fact the most beautiful and effective weapons 



ISO 



