Field notebook
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Field notebook
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Taxonomic class
This practical browse label comes from the published animal profiles. Taxonomy changes as evidence improves; individual source records remain the authority.
Most flying birds carry air-filled bones to stay light. The common loon does the opposite, packing dense, largely solid bones that trade lift for the ability to dive tens of metres after fish.
The kagu, a ground-dwelling New Caledonian bird, has fleshy movable flaps called nasal corns covering each nostril, a structure not documented in any other living bird species and linked to its habit of probing leaf litter.
Loggerhead shrikes spear insects, lizards and mice on thorns or barbed wire, using the spike as a substitute for the strong grasping talons they never evolved.
A curlew probing deep in mud cannot open its whole bill against the sediment. Instead the upper mandible flexes near the tip, a mechanism called rhynchokinesis, so the bird can grip a worm at depth with only the last few millimetres moving.
The technique of prising open a kerbside wheelie bin lid appeared in a few Sydney suburbs and then spread outward along neighbourhood lines. Mapping where it turned up showed social learning, not independent invention in each place.
Cormorants stand with wings spread because parts of their plumage soak up water. That looks like a design flaw, but wet outer feathers reduce buoyancy and make diving cheaper, so the drying posture is the price of an efficient hunt.
When one bird in a flock was shot, the rest circled back to the fallen individual rather than fleeing. Hunters could therefore take an entire flock from a single position, a behaviour repeatedly described in nineteenth-century accounts.
Weka are declining across parts of New Zealand and are protected. They are also capable nest raiders, taking eggs and chicks of seabirds and other natives, which has led conservation managers to remove weka from some islands they were introduced to.
Roman tradition credits the sacred geese of the Capitol with raising the alarm during a night attack. The practice is not merely ancient: geese have served as working sentries at military installations and distilleries into the modern era.
Every other bird avoids the polar winter. Emperor penguins walk inland onto sea ice as it forms, and males incubate a single egg on their feet through months of darkness and temperatures far below freezing without eating.
The hoatzin digests foliage using bacterial fermentation in a greatly enlarged crop, the only bird known to do so. The chamber is so heavy that the bird's flight muscles are reduced to make room for it.
The size gap between the sexes is among the largest of any bird, with females roughly twice the mass of males. The two hunt different prey as a result, which is thought to widen the range a pair can exploit while breeding.
The famous cackle is not amusement but a group territorial signal, usually given at dawn and dusk by a family party in chorus. Neighbouring groups answer, and the exchange marks boundaries without the birds having to meet.
European sailors called this flightless North Atlantic bird the penguin long before anyone reached Antarctica. When explorers met similar black-and-white divers in the southern ocean they reused the name, even though the two groups are not closely related.
The last widely accepted records of the ivory-billed woodpecker date from the 1940s in Louisiana and the 1980s in Cuba. Later claimed rediscoveries produced no image that convinced the field, and the species' formal status remains contested.
The white-tailed eagle was shot out of Britain by the early twentieth century: the last known breeding was on Skye in 1916, and the last bird was killed on Shetland in 1918. Norwegian birds released on Rum from 1975 rebuilt the population.
A hunting shoebill can stand still for many minutes, then throws its whole body forward in a lunge that ornithologists call a collapse, scooping bill, water and vegetation together before spitting out everything that is not food.