Dear wwh,

Thank you so much for supplying this word! I'm reading a pretty good book about birds entitled:

The Human Nature of Birds by Theodore Xenophon Barber, Ph.D. There was a passage I read last night that included the word altricial and I was plumb proud of myself for understanding it immediately.

"If the newborn infant is placed on the mother's stomach for the first feeding, it appears automatically to seek the milk in the breast. Specifically, it tends to push itself forward with its legs, flails its arms, attempts to clutch with its hands, searches with its mouth....Furthermore, the human newborn's mouth opens automatically when its cheek is touched just as the altricial chick's mouth opens or 'gapes' automatically when the edge of its jaw is touched," (p. 27).

Thanks, Bill!