the secretarybird is a bird of prey that can fly well, but prefers to walk around on its long legs, especially when foraging. it uses its flexible toes to grab prey—large arthropods and small to mid-sized terrestrial vertebrate. it throws the prey around and kicks it forcefully, smashing it to death or breaking its spine. the shoebill, meanwhile, for lack of a better theory was long considered a large aberrant stork relative in the ciconiiformes. this eventually proved incorrect. while "b. rex" is indeed a member of the same group of "higher waterbirds" as are storks and herons, it is closely related to pelicans and thus came to be included in the pelecaniformes—which are not monophyletic as described in old times, however, and whose small core group, for simplicity, is included in the ciconiiformes by some recent authors. insofar, the shoebill is today recognized as the formerly missing link uniting pelicans and storks. like the pelicans, it uses its massive bill and throat sac to catch large fish and similar aquatic vertebrates, but unlike them it is a wading, not a swimming bird, and correspondingly has long legs like a stork. it clambers through reed beds in search of good fishing spots, and uses its flexible toes to firmly hold on to such uncertain substrate as heaps of wind-blown vegetation at the edge of the open water or roots and logs of trees.