The Feet of Birds. 51 



The Woodpeckers are also furnished with feet most suitable to 

 their climbing habits. Each foot is provided with four toes, 

 arranged in pairs, two directed forwards and two backwards ; 

 these afford an immense support, and as they are very strong and 

 terminate with hooked claws, it may be conceived what useful 

 instruments they must be to birds whose lives are passed in 

 climbing about the trunks and branches of trees ; indeed, very 

 similar in form are they to the iron crampions which the Swiss 

 chamois-hunter affixes to the soles of his feet when about to 

 scale the precipices of the Alps and climb among the dangerous 

 chasms of the glacier. 



Again, the Avocet is provided with feet of singular construc- 

 tion. This bird is a wader in every sense, deriving its food from 

 the softest mud at the estuaries of rivers, to support it on which 

 no ordinary feet would suffice ; we see the toes, therefore, united 

 for a considerable part of their length by a concave membrane, 

 not wholly webbed, for the bird is incapable of swimming to any 

 distance, but semi-palmated, and connected far more than those 

 of any other species in the order ; the tarsus, too, is long and 

 slender: the tibia naked for two-thirds of its entire length, so 

 that it can wade into water of considerable depth, in search of 

 food. 



No less singular in the appearance of its legs and feet is the 

 Black-winged Stilt, or Long-legged Plover; either name at 

 once points to the remarkable and apparently disproportionate 

 length of its legs, on which its body seems raised up above the 

 water, as if on stilts. It is almost needless to add that this bird, 

 too, obtains its food by wading in muddy creeks and shallows on 

 the shore. 



The Coots and Phalaropes, which compose jthe small family 

 lobe-footed, claim our attention last. I have before alluded to 

 them as the connecting-link between the true waders and 

 swimmers, and their feet certainly present a peculiarity, par- 

 taking of the form which is characteristic of both those orders. 

 Thus, though the toes are not wholly united by a connecting 

 membrane, yet they are furnished laterally with it to such a 



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