KINGFISHERS: BELTED KINGFISHER 
375 
they naturally traverse head first; but the instinct to return to the 
warm family cluster is strong, and to do this they are obliged to walk 
backwards. Again when the rattle of the alma mater announcing the 
capture of another fish is heard, each struggles to get down the narrow 
passage-way first, but when the parent enters the hole she hustles them 
all back.” 
Walking in these cramped quarters with the ordinary land bird foot, 
with spreading toes and curved claws might be decidedly awkward, and, 
accordingly, we find an almost abortive foot with one toe rudimentary 
and two coherent (non-spreading). Furthermore, as Mr. Herrick's 
photographs demonstrate, these strange birds walk “on the whole 
tarsus, which corresponds to the scaly part of the leg of a fowl, so that 
the ‘drum-stick* rises from the heel” (1901, p. 89), giving a long narrow 
ski, most perfectly adapted to skiing either forward or backward in 
narrow tunnels, and which, when the burrow is being excavated, shoves 
out the earth chiseled loose by the great bill. The two tracks, which 
Mr. W. L. Finley speaks of, running from the door to the nest chamber, 
“worn by the feet of the birds” (1907a, p. 145), and Mr. Herrick's 
picture showing a stream of sand falling from the nest hole as one bird 
backs out (1901, p. 87), tell the story graphically. 
Although it has been said that the male does not incubate, Mr. 
Joseph Mailliard has found one incubating (1921, pp. 194-195). As 
the Kingfisher's nests are often raided by snakes, sometimes large 
black snakes, it may be safer for the male to take the food to his mate 
on the nest; as when both parents are momentarily away the arch 
enemy sometimes slips in and destroys the eggs. In a nest that Mr. 
Herrick watched, before the young left, the nest chamber had been 
“ gradually opened up in front and filled at the rear until it had advanced 
a foot and a half toward the mouth of the tunnel” (1901, p. 92). 
It is hard to think of a Kingfisher out of sight of water, but Dr. 
W. Ii. Osgood once found one in Arizona miles from water and was 
much amused watching it “hopping about on the ground catching 
insects” (1903, p. 130). 
At the strongly alkaline Burford Lakes, on the morning of October 
2, 1904, we were surprised to see one of the big crested birds perched 
on a dead tree on the edge of the water. Apparently he had just arrived. 
Before night he was in a tree over the muddy fresh water rain pools by 
camp; and the next morning he was gone, doubtless in search of clearer 
and sweeter as well as more fruitful waters. 
In the fall and winter of 1912-13, Mr. Ligon saw one on the Alamosa 
River in Socorro County. As he says, “although the water was gen¬ 
erally frozen along the edges, morning and night, and at times almost 
all over, I saw the bird dive under and come up with its fish. In Jan¬ 
uary and February I noted it constantly on the east Gila, but as nesting 
