Feet and Legs 3^5 



the brim, now wading in a short distance, then leaping 

 to a soft rim of clay, everywhere finding the most delicious 

 morsels abundant. A strange fascination took hold of the 

 tree-haunting warbler, and although perhaps you and 

 I would have said he was a very silly bird and that such 

 a thing as a warbler turning into a sandpiper was utterly 

 absurd, yet the little fellow and his descendants persisted. 

 Sandpipers and sandpipers only they wished to be, and 

 Nature has given them their wish. 



Study the Water Thrushes of to-day. Their whole 

 life is spent along some stream or pond, searching for 

 worms and snails in true sandpiper fashion. Not only 

 this, but even the dipping gait of the pipers has been 

 copied, and though we cannot give a reason for this char- 

 acteristic, yet the warblers have learned it by heart, 

 and many an amateur bird-lover do they confuse! But 

 the heart of the old clan instinct can never be entirely 

 eliminated, and even if a warbler should attempt to hum 

 away his life on the wing like a hummingbird, or to run 

 with the speed of the wind through dry deserts like an 

 ostrich, yet, like the Water Thrushes, he would occasion- 

 ally drift back to the old tree-tops and there sing of the 

 happiness which is within his heart. 



A strange whim of evolution in one member of the 

 warbler tribe results in his mimicking the sandpiper as far as 

 terrestrial locomotion, a walking gait, and the peculiar tilt- 

 ing habit go, but the fondness for water did not accompany 

 these changes, and so we find the Oven-bird content with 

 the deep woods where he builds his home upon the ground. 

 He often returns for a time to the trees, but, like a college 



