HOW SOME GROWN-UP BIRDS GET A LIVING. 137 
a loose sac. We can, therefore, often look into a 
bird’s digestive apparatus and read much of his story. 
Some delicate traces of ancestry and ancestral habits 
are written there which are found nowhere else. But 
they are too technical for the scope of this little book. 
Some slight reference to them will occur elsewhere 
incidentally. 
Now, in glancing at the feeding habits of some of 
the birds, the reader is referred to Chapter XX XI, 
where will be found the groups in an accepted order, 
and to the diagram in Chapter XXX, where the kin- 
ship is indicated. 
The ostrich forms usually just “ pick up a living,” 
and are followed in this respect by the fowls and 
pigeons. The fowls scratch the earth and its cover- 
ing, and eat both animal and vegetable findings. But 
the pigeons do not scratch usually, though placed in 
the old group /asores, or Scrapers, and are almost if 
not entirely confined to seeds (with us) and to fruits 
(in the tropics). Some little seed- and worm-eating 
birds among the perchers also scratch, but with both 
feet instead of one, unlike the fowl forms. 
One bird, however, among the ostrich forms feeds 
by probing the soft mud for living things. It has a 
long, softly tipped beak, with the nostrils directly in 
the end of it, and surely uses the sense of smell in 
feeding. It is the Apteryxr of New Zealand—a small, 
almost wingless, totally flightless and flossy-feathered 
bird. 
In its long decurved, flexible beak there is a hint 
of the ancestry (as we shall see later) of all the mud- 
