Dumb Stupid Birds

Malleefowl | It Invented The Thermostat | Dumb Stupid Birds #42

The malleefowl buries its eggs in a meter-tall mound of rotting leaves and sand, then holds it at exactly thirty-three degrees Celsius for weeks by probing the dirt with its beak like a living thermometer. It does this up to eleven months a year and never sits on the eggs once. The chicks dig themselves out of a meter of sand, alone, and walk off without ever meeting their parents. Listed as Vulnerable.

Marabou Stork | The Undertaker Bird | Dumb Stupid Birds #41

The marabou stork stands five feet tall, has a ten-foot wingspan tying with the Andean condor, a bald pink head, and a foot-long fleshy pouch dangling from its throat that it uses to flirt. It eats anything from rotting elephant to plastic bags, tolerates anthrax, and quietly prevents disease outbreaks across half of Africa. There are about 500,000 of them. They are doing fine by lowering their standards.

Club-winged Manakin | The Bird That Plays Violin | Dumb Stupid Birds #40

The club-winged manakin is a twelve gram bird in the Andean cloud forest that produces sound by vibrating two specialized wing feathers against each other 107 times per second, like a cricket. It is the only known vertebrate that makes noise through stridulation. To do this, the species rebuilt its wing bones from hollow to solid, the entire engineering miracle that lets birds fly, traded for a single sustained tone at 1,500 hertz. Listed as Near Threatened. About 30,000 left. Evolution does not care what we think is sensible.

Southern Cassowary | The Bird That Plants the Forest | Dumb Stupid Birds #39

The southern cassowary stands five and a half feet tall in the rainforests of northeastern Australia, weighs one hundred thirty pounds, and carries a five-inch dagger on each foot. It communicates in twenty-three hertz infrasound, lays grapefruit-sized green eggs, and is the sole disperser for over two hundred rainforest plant species. Fewer than four thousand remain in Australia. The forest does not vanish overnight without them. It just slowly stops being able to reproduce itself.

Helmeted Hornbill | Solid Ivory In Its Skull | Dumb Stupid Birds #38

The helmeted hornbill: three kilograms, solid keratin casque, hunted for red ivory at five times the price of elephant tusk. Adult birds joust mid-air at twenty kilometers per hour over fig trees. Six thousand killed in West Kalimantan between 2012 and 2017. The only bird willing to use its own face as a hammer, and the only one keeping the strangler figs growing.