Birds and Birding's Guide to:
Watching THE SPARROW-LIKE BIRDS
THE FREE-TOED PERCHING BIRDS
THE OVEN-BIRDS AND ALLIES
(Family Furnariidce)
The present family, perhaps most typified by the Oven-birds, comprises a very large, exclusively neotropical group of nearly five hundred species of small nondescript birds, which resemble in many respects the members of the last family. This resemblance is so strong, in fact, that it has often been taken as a mark of kinship, and the two groups united under the name of the Dendrocolaptidce, but evidence has been accumulating which tends to prove their distinctness. Thus they differ, apparently universally, in having schizorhinal instead of holorhinal nostrils, while the outer toe is not conspicuously longer than the inner one, and all three anterior toes are coherent for much less than the full length of their basal phalanges, the characters of the feet being such as to permit their separation from the Wood Hewers at a glance.