XXIV
HIS FEET AND LEGS
A bird always stands on his toes, not on his whole foot, as we do. The long slim part that we call the leg is really the foot, and the joint we see nearly up to the bird's body is the bird's heel. But in this book we will speak of it in the common way, calling the toes the foot, and the part up to the joint the leg.
People all over the world have the same kind of feet and the same number of toes; but with birds it is not so. Most of them have four toes ([Fig 8]), but some have only three, and a few have no more than two.
In the use of the feet there is still more variety. There are, as Dr. Coues divides them, three kinds of feet among birds:—
