12 Weird and Rare Birds and the Odd Things They Do
Some birds look as if they were assembled from spare parts. A bird with a bill like a wooden shoe. A parrot that cannot fly and smells of honey. A vulture that dyes its own feathers. These are weird birds, and most of them are rare birds too, with small ranges or small numbers. Some are beautiful rare birds, some are frankly ugly. Here are twelve strange birds and the weird bird facts that the people who study them have actually recorded.
1. Shoebill
The shoebill, often called the shoebill stork, hunts in African wetlands by standing perfectly still for a long time and then falling on its prey. San Diego Zoo describes it “swiftly collapsing its entire body weight at the prey item, with its bill taking the brunt of the impact.” Most of what it catches is fish, but young water birds and crocodiles are on the menu too.
The bill has a second job. Parents fill it with water and pour it over the nest to cool the eggs, sometimes four or five times a day. A tracking study found shoebills moving less than 3 km on 81% of days. And in hot weather the bird keeps itself cool by urinating on its own legs.
2. Kakapo parrot
The kakapo smells. One researcher quoted by Audubon describes the scent as “a mix of lavender and honey and dust.” It is New Zealand’s flightless parrot, the heaviest parrot in the world at up to 4 kg for a male, active at night, and possibly the longest-lived bird of all, at 60 to 90 years.
It still climbs trees and jumps off them. NZ Birds Online describes the result as, at best, “a controlled plummet.” Its defence is to freeze and trust its green camouflage, which worked against birds that hunt by sight and fails completely against mammals that hunt by smell. Numbers fell to about 50 birds in the mid-1990s. Today there are 325, all of them wild.
3. Hoatzin bird
Hoatzins eat leaves and ferment them in an enlarged crop, the only bird known to digest food the way a cow does. Cornell Lab calls them flying cows. Like cows, they make methane and belch it out, with a smell compared to cow manure.
The oversized crop leaves little room for flight muscles, so hoatzins fly badly and often rest their breastbone on the branch as they perch. The chicks have something adults lack: claws on their wings. When danger comes, a chick drops into the water below, swims, and then climbs back up to the nest, hooking itself along with those claws.
4. Secretary bird
The secretary bird is an African bird of prey that hunts on foot, on the longest legs of any raptor. It walks 20 to 30 km a day looking for food, and it kills snakes by kicking them.
Researchers measured one captive male, Madeleine, and found a kick of 195 newtons, about five times the bird’s body weight. Each blow touched the target for an average of 15 milliseconds, a tenth of the time it takes to blink. The wing feathers help too: a snake that strikes at a flapping feather bites only hollow quill. The species is now classed as Endangered.
5. Potoo birds
By day a potoo turns into a piece of wood. It sits upright on a broken branch with its eyes almost shut and its feathers flattened. If it suspects it is being watched, Cornell’s account says, it stretches into the branch pose “all so gradually that no movement is perceptible.” One bird may use the same roost for months.
Potoos build no nest. The female lays a single egg in a crevice or on top of a broken stump, and the chick hides under the parent with only its head showing. By two weeks old it already freezes in the branch pose itself. At night the great potoo makes a drawn-out moaning growl that Cornell ranks among the most exciting and perhaps most unsettling night sounds of the American tropics.
6. Tawny frogmouth
The tawny frogmouth is often confused with an owl, but it is closer to the nightjars and has weak feet without an owl’s curved talons. When disturbed it stiffens, closes its eyes and points its beak at the sky, so that it looks like a broken branch.
Frogmouths pair for life, and when startled they buzz like a bee. On cold winter nights they save energy by letting their body temperature fall, in one study to as low as 29.1 °C, for about seven hours at a time. Many die on roads, hit by cars while chasing moths in the headlights.
Добавить в заметки чтобы посмотреть позже?7. Superb lyrebird
About 80% of a male lyrebird’s song is borrowed. The Australian Museum lists chainsaws, car engines and dog barks among the sounds it copies, along with the calls of local birds. When he displays, his curved outer tail feathers take the shape of a lyre.
He also uses his talent to deceive. A 2021 study found that when a female tries to leave his display area, the male imitates a whole flock of small birds mobbing a predator, right down to the whirr of their wings. Played back to other birds, the fake alarm was convincing enough to fool them.
8. Marvelous spatuletail
This hummingbird lives in a single valley in northern Peru, the Río Utcubamba. The male’s tail has only four feathers. Two of them are bare wires several times the length of the bird, each ending in a round racquet larger than its head, and special muscles let him swing them.
In courtship he bounces back and forth along a twig, then hovers in front of the female, waving the racquets and snapping. His whole species depends on that one valley, where some fires are set in the belief that burning brings rain.
9. Kiwi bird
A kiwi egg can weigh up to 20% of the mother. San Diego Zoo compares it to a 54 kg woman giving birth to an 11 kg baby. The kiwi is also the only bird with nostrils at the tip of its bill, and it can sneeze out dirt it has sniffed up.
The male incubates the egg for about 75 to 85 days, and the chicks hatch fully feathered and are never fed by their parents. Its closest relatives were the extinct elephant birds of Madagascar. Kiwi have no breastbone, which makes them fragile. New Zealand’s conservation department puts it bluntly: “A dog can kill a kiwi by just giving it a playful push.”
10. Bearded vulture
The bearded vulture is the only animal that lives mainly on bones. It swallows pieces the size of a sheep’s vertebra, and bones too big to swallow it drops from up to 100 metres onto rocks to smash them, a skill that can take years to learn.
Its rusty orange chest is make-up. The birds bathe in pools rich in iron oxide and stain their white feathers, and in captivity they stay white unless keepers give them iron-rich puddles. Nobody is sure why they do it. A study that tested the idea of an antibacterial benefit found results running against it.
11. Southern cassowary
Each foot of this cassowary bird carries a dagger-like inner claw up to 10 cm long. It can run at 50 km/h through rainforest, jump nearly 2 metres straight up, and swim. The Australian Museum warns that it “will readily attack a persistent intruder,” and in the breeding season fathers guarding chicks are very aggressive.
Its booming call is the lowest known of any bird, at the edge of human hearing, and keepers say they feel it in their bones. The father incubates the eggs and raises the chicks while the female leaves. There are now fewer southern cassowaries in Australia than giant pandas in China.
12. Andean cock-of-the-rock
Peru’s national bird has a crest like a mohawk that nearly hides its bill. Males gather in groups of 15 or more and face off in pairs, bowing, flapping and snapping their bills, with a call that San Diego Zoo compares to “a cross between a rooster’s crow and a pig’s grunt.”
The female ignores all of it until her house is ready. She spends a month or more building a mud nest on a cliff face or under an overhang, and only after it is finished does she choose a mate. Then she raises the chicks alone.
One last bird fact: why weird birds are often rare
Look at where some of these birds live: the spatuletail in one valley in Peru, the kakapo on a few islands in southern New Zealand. Their odd habits suited the world they evolved in. The kakapo’s freeze-and-hide trick works against hawks and is useless against mammals that follow their noses. The kiwi’s missing breastbone means a dog at play can kill it. When a bird is built for one place, it has nowhere else to go.