i6o CHILDHOOD OF ANIMALS 



ibises and spoonbills, lyre-birds, owls, petrels, pigeons (in these 

 again the down is so scanty as almost to be absent), the secretary 

 bird, storks, sun-bitterns and tropic birds. Most of these are 

 rather large or powerful and ferocious birds, well able to defend 

 their young. Lastly there is a group in which the young are 

 hatched naked and helpless. The pigeons and herons almost 

 might be placed here, and the group includes some like gannets, 

 cormorants, and pelicans and parrots, in which down is very soon 

 developed, and many in which there are slight traces of down, but 

 on the whole they are practically downless. This third list contains 

 barbets, bee-eaters, cormorants and gannets, cuckoos, honey-guides, 

 hoopoos, hombills, humming-birds, kingfishers, motmots, colies, 

 parrots, passerine birds, pelicans, rollers, swifts, todies, toucans, 

 trogons, woodpeckers. The most general statement to be made 

 about this last list is that it contains those birds which most 

 anatomists would recognise as being the highest or most bird-like 

 birds. 



There has taken place amongst birds, or rather I might say there 

 is taking place amongst birds, a change from a condition in which 

 the newly hatched young can very quickly look after themselves, 

 to a condition in which the young are absolutely dependent on their 

 parents for some time after they are hatched. The older, more 

 reptilian condition in which the young were provided for by a 

 merely material sacrifice on the part of the mother, by storing a 

 large quantity of yolk in the egg, is being replaced by a condition 

 in which the self-seeking instincts of the parents are temporarily 

 changed into instincts and habits where the main object of life is 

 not self-interest, but the satisfying of the needs of others. 



Even when the newly hatched young are fairly active and soon 

 able to feed themselves, one or both parents guard and protect 

 them for a considerable time. They exchange call-notes and when 

 danger comes near, the young hasten to shelter under the wings 

 of their parent or squat down whilst she attempts to lure away the 

 intruder, sometimes, like the plover or the partridge, pretending to 

 have a broken limb or to be lame, and so diverting attention to her- 

 self, sometimes, as in the case of the hens of fowls and pheasants, or 

 by the cocks and hens in gulls, attacking the supposed enemy savagely. 

 A few birds carry their young about. The woodcock holds them 

 between her legs, partly supporting them by her beak when she 

 flies from one feeding-ground to another. Grebes carry the young 

 on the back as they swim through the water, and every one must 



