Bird
Feathered bipedal vertebrates with lightweight hollow bones, toothless beaks, and high metabolic rates.
Mute Swan
Not actually mute: it hisses, snorts and twirls with its wings raised.
North Island Brown Kiwi
A flightless night forager with its nostrils near the tip of its bill and an egg that averages 15 percent of its mother's weight.
Northern Cardinal
A red songbird that turns yellow food pigments into scarlet feathers.
Osprey
The fish-hawk that hovers over water, then plunges feet first to grab a fish in its talons.
Pileated Woodpecker
A crow-sized woodpecker that chisels rectangular holes into trees to reach the ants inside.
Red-Tailed Hawk
The copper-tailed hawk whose cry voices bald eagles in TV ads.
Resplendent Quetzal
A cloud forest trogon revered by pre-Columbian cultures, whose males grow iridescent tail plumes up to 90 centimeters long.
Rock Dove
A cliff bird turned city bird, fed on "pigeon milk" as a chick, and in its trained homing form able to find its way back to the loft from far away.
Roseate Spoonbill
The pink wader that hunts by touch, swinging a slightly open spoon-shaped bill through the shallows and snapping it shut when it contacts prey.
Ruby-throated Hummingbird
A metabolic dynamo that can beat its wings more than 50 times a second and cross the Gulf of Mexico in a single non-stop flight.
Sandhill Crane
A red-capped crane that duets with its mate and sleeps standing in the shallows.
Satin Bowerbird
Stick-avenue builder, blue-object collector, and a courtship act of buzzes, rattles and mimicry.
Scarlet Macaw
A big scarlet parrot that feeds mostly in the forest canopy, with a beak that can break open the toughest nuts.
Secretarybird
The stilt-legged snake executioner whose stomp, measured in one captive male, peaked at five times his body weight on average.
Shoebill Stork
Prehistoric-looking swamp stalker with a foot-long bill shaped like a clog.
Snow Petrel
An all-white Antarctic seabird that sometimes nests hundreds of kilometers inland and spits stomach oil that can build up around its nest for thousands of years.
Sociable Weaver
The Kalahari architect that builds one shared straw mega-nest big enough for hundreds of birds, with some still standing more than a century later.
Southern Cassowary
A five-inch dagger-like claw on each foot, a leap of up to seven feet, and a casque that glows under ultraviolet light.
Superb Lyrebird
Ground-dwelling mimic whose courtship act includes a fake alarm-flock illusion convincing enough to fool real birds.
Toco Toucan
A blood-vessel-packed bill that doubles as a radiator, and a throat that takes fruit without the tongue ever touching it.
Turkey Vulture
A scavenger with a real nose, and a habit of riding warm air.
Vogelkop Bowerbird
A generally brown bird that builds what biologists call the most elaborately decorated structure erected by an animal other than humans, in a style that changes from range to range.
Wandering Albatross
Perhaps the longest wingspan of any bird, and in a year off from breeding some circle Antarctica twice or even three times.
Western Grebe
Tied with Clark's grebe as the largest animal known to run on water, sprinting across a lake in a courtship display called rushing.