Dumb Stupid Birds

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.

The shoebill stands five feet tall in a Central African swamp, does not move for hours, and hunts by falling forward onto things. It is classified as Vulnerable. There are fewer than 5,300 left. It looks like something that should have gone extinct with the dinosaurs, and it stares at you like it knows that.

The blue jay is loud, obnoxious, impersonates hawks for personal gain, and is not actually blue. It is also, incidentally, responsible for replanting the entire eastern deciduous forest of North America after the last ice age. You're welcome.

The belted kingfisher is top-heavy, ragingly territorial, named after a Greek myth, and the only bird in North America where the female is more colorful than the male. It nests inside a tunnel it digs with its face. It has been doing this, loudly, near every river on the continent, for at least 600,000 years.

The ostrich is the largest bird alive, the fastest two-legged animal on Earth, and the only bird whose eyes are literally bigger than its brain. It does not bury its head in the sand. What it actually does is considerably more interesting and considerably more violent.