Dumb Stupid Birds

The kiwi hunts by smell, the only bird with nostrils at the tip of its beak. It has whiskers, heavy marrow-filled bones, fur-like feathers, and two working ovaries. The female lays an egg up to 20 percent of its body...

The ruff comes in three permanent kinds of male: one fights, one freeloads, and one disguises itself as a female to slip past both. Which one a ruff becomes is fixed before hatching, locked in a chunk of chromosome that...

During breeding season, male standard-winged nightjars grow a single feather on each wing into a two-foot bare shaft with a flag on the end. In flight, the flags trail behind so precisely that one bird looks like three...

The Egyptian vulture is two feet tall, weighs about four pounds, and breaks open ostrich eggs by picking up rocks and throwing them. It also eats the dung of cows, sheep, and goats to absorb carotenoids that turn its...

The common murre lays a single pear-shaped egg directly on bare rock, packs twenty birds per square meter, and at three weeks old encourages its flightless chick to step off a six-hundred-foot cliff. Survival rate above...

The burrowing owl is nine inches tall, lives underground, hunts in broad daylight, and uses cow dung to bait dung beetles into a hole. When threatened, the chicks impersonate a western diamondback rattlesnake well...

The superb bird-of-paradise is a forgettable black bird in New Guinea until it sweeps a stage, snaps into a hovering oval, and becomes a glowing face. Its feathers absorb up to 99.95 percent of light, a structural...

The great bowerbird is a drab grey-brown crow relative that builds a stick avenue, then sorts thousands of bones and stones by size to bend depth, the same optical trick film crews use to cheat scale. A 2012 study in...

The malleefowl buries its eggs in a meter-tall mound of rotting leaves and sand, then holds it at exactly thirty-three degrees Celsius for weeks by probing the dirt with its beak like a living thermometer. It does this...

The marabou stork stands five feet tall, has a ten-foot wingspan tying with the Andean condor, a bald pink head, and a foot-long fleshy pouch dangling from its throat that it uses to flirt. It eats anything from rotting...

The club-winged manakin is a twelve gram bird in the Andean cloud forest that produces sound by vibrating two specialized wing feathers against each other 107 times per second, like a cricket. It is the only known...

The southern cassowary stands five and a half feet tall in the rainforests of northeastern Australia, weighs one hundred thirty pounds, and carries a five-inch dagger on each foot. It communicates in twenty-three hertz...

The helmeted hornbill: three kilograms, solid keratin casque, hunted for red ivory at five times the price of elephant tusk. Adult birds joust mid-air at twenty kilometers per hour over fig trees. Six thousand killed in...

Milvus migrans is a medium-sized raptor, about fifty centimeters long, six million strong across four continents, and it eats garbage for a living. In northern Australia, three raptor species including the black kite...

The hoopoe wears a crown of cinnamon feathers tipped in black, appears in tomb art in ancient Egypt, in Aristotle, in the Bible, in the Quran, and tells everyone its name in three soft notes. It is also the national...