Liberia ^ 



and back. On this upper part of the boJy, from the base of 

 the neck to the wing-coverts, there are — especially in the adult 

 male — a number of round yellowish spots, each spot surrounded 

 with a ring of greenish black. It has a broad tail of fairly long 

 stiff feathers. The neck is long and snaky, rather goose-like, 

 with a whitish line down the middle on each side, extending 

 from the eyebrow to the shoulders. The beak is rather long 

 and heron-like. The feet are the most easily distinguished 

 feature of the bird. There are four toes, of nearly equal length, 

 which are webbed in separate lobes like the toes of a coot. 



The finfoot dives and swims well, and is able in some way 

 to depress its body when swimming, so that little more than 

 the snaky neck and sharp beak (nearly continuous in outline 

 with the forehead and throat) appear above the surface, moving 

 backwards and forwards in just the same way as the uplifted 

 head of a snake when it is swimming, anci raises itself to observe 

 what is going on. Several times the present writer has observed 

 finfoots on West African streams, and taken them at first to 

 be snakes swimming across the water. 



The Finfoots are distributed nearly all round the world 

 in the tropical belt. Biittikofer states that the end of the 

 thumb in the wing is armed with a long, slender, only slightly 

 curved claw, a feature which occurs in not a few other birds, 

 such as the ostrich, the young of the duck, and so on. It 

 does not appear to be specially developed in any specimens of 

 the West African finfoot which have come under my notice. 

 The finfoots, from their world-wide distribution and some 

 features in their anatomy, are one of those indeterminate types 

 not very closely identified with any particular order. No doubt 

 their nearest affinities are with the rails, but they may be related 

 to an older stock, which gave rise not only to the rails, but to 

 the herons, and possibly the pelicans. 



764 



