With Bent Beaks Testifying To Their Clumsiness, Pied Avocets Will Often Trip Over Small Rocks And Driftwood

With bent beaks testifying to their clumsiness, Pied Avocets will often trip over small rocks and driftwood while chasing down minuscule crabs and beach insects. Fortunately this cosmetic damage is impermanent, as their beaks are lined with a sponge-like network of veins and capillaries which ‘re-inflate’ the beak within an hour or so of bending.

Persnickety florists, Rainbow Lorikeets can take upwards of an hour to select the perfect flowers for their seasonal arrangements. Using their sensitive tongues they can accurately determine which flowers will endure display the longest before withering, and their scissorlike beaks can swiftly nip through even the toughest of stems.

Juvenile humans seeking an identity will often associate themselves with the music they listen to; juvenile grebes are no different. Further driving home this similarity, juvenile grebes have terrible taste in music. Above, a juvenile Great Crested Grebe wears makeup in the traditional style of a ‘Juggalo’ (an enthusiast of Detroit-based ‘horrorcore’ hip-hop duo Insane Clown Posse).

Ordinarily, parent pigeons will begin producing ‘crop milk’ to feed their chicks shortly before the eggs hatch. One of the more horrifying implementations of this nurturing exudate can be found in the Luzon Bleeding-heart dove. Incapable of regurgitation, these birds peck a small hole through their own torso in order to allow their young access to the crop. Thankfully baby bleeding-hearts only need this for a period of two weeks before they are grown enough for small caterpillars and seeds, at which point the wound is allowed to close.

The Nuthatch is an unusual woodpecker that searches the undersides of branches for tasty grubs that other gravity-observing birds overlook. This eccentric behaviour is facilitated by an organ not unlike the swim bladder of fishes; in the case of the Nuthatch the bladder is filled with helium, making them vulnerable to poaching for the party balloon trade.

As summer rolls around, please make sure to stay well clear of Killdeer nests! These savagely territorial shorebirds can and will destroy any creatures that approach within twenty metric feet of their eggs. Thankfully they are primarily insectivorous, so a perimeter of variously-sized animal corpses can usually be found demarcating the ‘dead zone’.