126300 
A HISTORY 
OF 
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Family FALCONID, or BIRDS OF PREY. 
Tue Birds of Prey are distinguished by their powerful hooked bills and 
their strong feet armed with sharp, curved, powerful talons. At the base 
of the bill is a piece of naked skin called the cere. The Owls also possess 
this character, but may be distinguished by their fluffy plumage and facial 
disk. 
The Falconide area well-defined family ; but great difference of opinion 
exists as to their relationship to other groups. Sclater (guided by Huxley’s 
investigations of the bones of the palate) places them in the same series * 
with the Cuckoos, the Parrots, the Owls, the Pelicans, the Herons, and the 
Ducks. Forbes (relying largely upon Garrod’s study of the muscular 
and arterial systems) removes from this list the Cuckoos, the Parrots, and 
the Owls, and adds to it the Petrels. Gadow, on the other hand, retains in 
the same great division the Parrots and the Owls, rejecting the Pelicans, 
the Herons, and the Ducks, as well as the Petrels, but adding the Pigeons 
and the Gallinaceous birds. It will thus be seen that there is no 
other family which these three authorities all agree to unite with the Birds 
of Prey. I have placed them first in my arrangement because they were 
so placed by Cuvier in his classification—a system which, although it is 
now universally admitted to be mainly an artificial one, is so well known to 
all ornithologists that it may well serve as an index until the natural order 
of sequence has been discovered. 
Birds of Prey are cosmopolitan, the greatest number of species being 
found in South America, and the fewest in the Pacific islands. Sharpe, in 
VOL. I. B 
