birdslut:

matchbook-stories:

gessorly:

stuckinabucket:

Okay, guys, listen up.  This bird.  This fucking bird, you guys.  It is just like, unbelievable.  And the worst part about it is that, like, I try to tell people about it, but I can never remember its name, and google searches for “crazy fuck-off failure birds with absolutely insane chicks” are surprisingly unhelpful.  Like, no, Google, I don’t want to get sucked into a TV Tropes black hole right now.  No, Google, I don’t want to read about Lars von Trier right now.

This bird is a hoatzin. H-O-A-T-Z-I-N.  Aka Opisthocomus hoazin.

And you’re probably looking at it going, well, okay, sure, it looks interesting, but not that much more interesting than like a bowerbird or a bird of paradise or a parrot or something.  Looks are deceiving, my friend.  Looks are the least of this bird’s problems.

So, this bird.  This bird is strictly herbivorous, which is not super-weird for birds, and eats a lot of leaves and very little fruit, which is super-weird for birds.  As you may remember from science class, leaves are nutritionally difficult; they’re nutrient-poor and the energy they do contain is difficult to process.  This is why cows have like, four stomachs whose combined volume is greater than the interior volume of the cow. (Cow stomachs: the original Tardis joke.) Most birds that don’t eat meat tend to go for higher-value forage like nuts, seeds, fruit, and roots. This bird does not.

To help it digest the leaves, the hoatzin developed a huge, two-chambered crop and an enlarged esophagus, which functions like the stomach of a ruminant or the enlarged foregut seen in many leaf-eating primates.  It serves as a fermenter, using bacteria and body-heat to break down the leaves and fruit and make them more readily-accessible to its shrinky-dink stomach.  It also makes the bird smell distinctly like an over-active compost pile.  Also also?  It’s so big that it displaces the bird’s breast muscles and part of its keel, drastically reducing its flight capacity.

Above: Look at that fucking thing.  It’s enormous.

Above: The crop of a bird who can fly.

Because of the smell, humans pretty much won’t eat the hoatzin unless they’re starving, which has left it pretty well habituated to the presence of man.  Between it knowing we won’t it eat, and its shitty flight record, they pretty much just move over on the branch when they see people coming.  They’re like, “Yeah, I see you.  No, I’m not moving.  Fuck you, come back when you’ve got the balls to eat me.”

You might think that the crap flying might impair the bird’s ability to live, seeing as it is a bird, and that’s technically pretty much what they do.  Well, it’s a bird who sticks to mangrove swamps and riverine forests in the Amazon, so…not so much.  We’re talking pretty dense, gnarled vegetation here.  Agility is more important than stamina, and if you haven’t got either, you tend to go for specialization in arboreal locomotion.

The hoatzin is awesome at arboreal locomotion.  It uses its feet, wings, and a callused bump on the bottom of its honking great crop to navigate and balance on branches.  But what’s really rad/horrific about this bird is how it is as a chick.

I should say something about riverine forests first, though.  Pretty much anywhere you get a forest right up against a river that experiences massive annual flooding, you’ll get a specialized annual ecosystem.  The trees and plants wouldn’t be there if they couldn’t survive a month or two submerged, and the animals would be literally up shit creek if they couldn’t swim.  In this case, we’re talking about the Amazon.  The unbelievable annual floods in the Amazon are why sloths can swim.  Threatened by an arboreal predator, like a jaguar, sloths will just drop into the water and swim off into the sunset.

So will hoatzin chicks.

See, hoatzin chicks are born fairly independent.  Their parents feed them, but they’re extremely mobile on their own pretty much from the get-go.  They have oversized feet, strong beaks, and fucking claws on their wings.

Above: Fucking. Claws. On. Their. Wings.

Above: It’s coming for you in your dreams.

Above: Blah blah French girls, Jack.

So hoatzins build their nests over water in fairly dense undergrowth.  The babies can climb out of the nest, crawl around in the trees, and, if threatened by a predator that the adults can’t successfully drive off or lure away, they can drop into the water and chill for a little while until it’s gone.

Above: A hoatzin chick who’s missing Cake Boss over this shit.

Then they swim back to the trees, climb up the undergrowth, and climb back into their nests.

Above: EVOLUTION!

You might think, like, this is actually kind of a failure of evolution, because look at these motherfucking archaeopteryx-looking bastards.  They’re from the fucking stone age, right?  Well, kind of but not really.  There’s pressure to conserve certain useful old-school traits, like what we saw earlier in walking-stick wings.  Wing-claws are one of them, in this case.  So the bird has evolved, it just kept some of the old junk in the trunk because it still works for them.

The chicks lose their wing-claws when they get older, which seems like a rip-off, but I guess once they get their adult plumage in, they can make up the loss by sucking at flight instead of being great at dinosauring.

Above: Remembers when it was better at dinosauring.

Definitely in my top ten favourite birds. Because I was a dinosaur geek as a kid, and clawed wings!

FUCK YEAH HOATZINS

sometimes i am just really glad that tumblr exists to spread the word about how fucking awesome birds are

bird, bird, bird is the word

redknots:

Birds are ridiculous, and owls are no exception

——————-

Onondaga Creekwalk, Syracuse, NY
2-10-15