The curl-crested aracari lives in a narrow slice of the southwestern Amazon and grows feathers on its head that are curled into tight, glossy coils. They look like strips of black electrical tape. Under a microscope, each one is a single feather with widened, flattened barbs fused into a hollow spiral. No other bird does this. Overdressed, undefeated.

The Anna's Hummingbird weighs four and a half grams, beats its wings fifty times per second, and dives at fifty one miles per hour. Measured in body lengths per second, that is three hundred and eighty five, faster than a peregrine falcon. It pulls over nine g on the recovery, the same force that knocks out fighter pilots in pressurized suits. And it does all of this to make a chirping noise with its tail feathers.

The oilbird lives in pitch black caves in northern Venezuela, navigates by echolocation at two kilohertz (which is audible to humans and sounds like hundreds of screaming children), flies up to seventy-five miles a night to eat fruit, and was named Oilbird because indigenous communities used to boil the fifty-percent-fat chicks into clear, odorless lamp oil that lit the streets of Caracas for months. Every tree in the surrounding rainforest owes it a favor.

The bar-tailed godwit flies 7,258 miles from Alaska to New Zealand without stopping. Before takeoff, it shrinks its own kidneys, liver, and intestines by up to twenty-five percent to save weight. There are roughly 150,000 of them, and they have been doing this for tens of thousands of years. The greatest threat to a bird that solved crossing the Pacific is a parking lot built on a mudflat.

Indicator indicator: twelve grams, eats beeswax almost nothing else can digest, communicates with wild humans using a co-evolved call-and-response system documented in a 2016 Science paper, and hatches with temporary hooked mandibles it uses to kill every other nestling in the nest. The hooks fall off after a week. It is classified as Least Concern, which feels like an understatement.

One hundred grams. 44,000 miles a year, pole to pole, for thirty years straight. Over a lifetime, the Arctic tern logs roughly 1.5 million miles - three round trips to the Moon - on wings that span two and a half feet. It sees more daylight than any animal on Earth because it simply decided winter was optional. It dive-bombs researchers for sport. The puffins moved in next door for the free security.

Thirty million years of evolution, a syrinx that produces two sounds simultaneously, and a memory that holds a flute melody played by a stranger who left years ago. The superb lyrebird mimics over twenty species, chainsaws, camera shutters, and car alarms with fidelity that fools the originals. It looks like a farmyard bird. It sounds like the entire forest.

The common swift eats, sleeps, drinks, and mates in the air. A 2016 study tracked one group for ten months straight and logged zero landings. Its scientific name, Apus apus, means "without feet" because Aristotle watched swifts and decided they did not have any. A single swift can fly four million miles in a lifetime. The distance to the moon and back, eight times.

The hoatzin is a pheasant-sized Amazonian bird with a mohawk, no close living relatives, and the only foregut fermentation chamber ever evolved inside a bird. It ferments leaves in its throat like a cow, smells exactly like a barn, and has given up most of its flight muscles to make room for the compost. The chicks grew working claws on their wings, on purpose, so they can swim away from predators and climb back up. Tens of millions of years of this. No plans to stop.

The kakapo is a four-kilogram flightless parrot that sits in a dirt bowl and shouts 60Hz bass notes into the dark for three months a year. It has been doing this, mostly unsuccessfully, for sixty million years.