Dumb Stupid Birds

It is a cuckoo. It kills rattlesnakes by slamming them against the ground. Every morning it spreads its back feathers and lets the sun charge it like a battery. The Greater Roadrunner has been doing exactly this - running, hunting, thermoregulating -... more

The female is brightly colored. The female competes aggressively for mates. The female lays the eggs - then leaves, immediately, to find another male. The male incubates alone for twenty days, raises the chicks alone, and weighs less than an ounce. I... more

The African Jacana weighs less than a lemon, has toes long enough to walk on lily pads, and carries up to four live chicks tucked under its wings during predator escapes - just eight tiny legs visible from the outside. The female is twice the male's ... more

The Eurasian wryneck is a woodpecker that cannot drill, will not excavate its own nest, and eats almost nothing but ants off the ground. Cornered, it twists its neck nearly half a turn and hisses like a snake. The ancient Greeks spun it on strings in... more

The Clark's nutcracker buries between thirty thousand and a hundred thousand pine seeds every autumn, hauling them in a pouch under its tongue and remembering thousands of individual caches under deep snow for up to nine months. The forgotten ones gr... more

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 weight, so large the bird has to ... more

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 flipped backwards around four ... more

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 birds flying in formation. Afte... more