  We perform a comparative study of the infrared properties of overlap and
staggered fermions in QCD. We observe that the infrared spectrum of the APE/HYP
improved staggered Dirac operator develops a four-fold near-degeneracy and is
in quantitative agreement with the infrared spectrum of the overlap operator.
The near-degeneracy allows us to identify the zero modes of the staggered
operator and we find that the number of zero modes is in line with the
topological index of the overlap operator.
