Habit And Instinct Author:C. Lloyd Morgan Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. LOCOMOTION IN YOUNG BIRDS. When young birds are hatched in an incubator drawer they seem at first to be exhausted by the effort, and require s... more »ome time to recover from the " catastrophe of birth." I have generally left them for twelve hours or so, by which time, if strong and healthy, they generally begin to move about and get into the corners of the drawer. If then removed and placed on the floor or ground, chicks, partridges, pheasants, guinea-fowl, and plovers are able to walk with such accuracy of inherited co-ordination that there can be no question as to the truly instinctive and congenital nature of the definiteness shown by these activities. Ducklings and moorhens are more unsteady on their legs at first, the leg-movements of the former being sprawly, and the body not well raised from the ground. A chick, pheasant, or partridge, can stand on one leg and scratch the side of his head with the other foot on his first day of life with only a little wobbling, but a duckling topples over or tilts backward on to his tail; the double co-ordination of standing on one foot and scratching his head with the other is too much for him. The clever way in which a little pheasant chick, only a few days old, will squeeze through a wire netting is not only exceedingly pretty, but is remarkable as showing nice control over the locornotor apparatus. Little moorhens seem to have a tendency to clamber up on toanything, such as a cloth heaped up on the ground, and use their skinny wings in a peculiar alternating hand-overhand fashion which is also seen in young dabchicks and in the South American hoactzin (Opisthocomus cristatus). This bird has, when quite young, the thumb or bastard wing armed with a claw, a second claw being developed on the digit of the wing corresponding ...« less