Birds keep surprising the people who study them. Meet a parrot that booms all night, a songbird that carries poison, a godwit that crossed the Pacific without a meal and a crow that bent a wire into a hook. You will also find pigeons that went to war, a penguin with a knighthood, a starling that sang Mozart, and the truth behind a few bird myths that refuse to die.
Every tile in a Birds game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Species
nine stories
1The flightless parrot that booms all night
On the tile: KakapoSince 1995
New Zealand's kakapo is the world's heaviest parrot, with males weighing up to 4 kilograms, about 9 pounds, and it cannot fly. Instead it climbs rimu trees, and it breeds only when those trees produce a bumper crop of fruit, every two to four years. Then each male scrapes out shallow bowls in the earth and booms from them for up to eight hours a night. Just 51 kakapo remained in 1995. After a record breeding season in 2026, the Department of Conservation counts 325.
The hoatzin of the Amazon and Orinoco basins eats mostly leaves and ferments them in a large crop, much as a cow does. The gas it burps gives it a manure-like smell and the nickname stinkbird. Its chicks hatch with claws on their wings. When a snake or monkey comes near, they hop out of the nest and belly-flop into the water below, then climb back up using those claws. The claws look like a relic of the dinosaurs, but researchers now think they evolved later, as a climbing aid.
In 1989 Jack Dumbacher, a graduate student on his first expedition to Papua New Guinea, freed a black-and-orange hooded pitohui from a mist net and got scratched. He put the cut to his lips, and his mouth tingled, burned and went numb. His local guides were not surprised: villagers knew these as rubbish birds, eaten only when skinned and specially prepared. In 1992 his team reported that the birds carry batrachotoxin, the poison of some Colombian poison dart frogs, making the pitohui the first poisonous bird known to science.
In 1799 Alexander von Humboldt followed Indigenous guides up a small river into a cave in the Caripe mountains of eastern Venezuela. By torchlight he found thousands of nests glued to the roof and shrieking birds overhead. The oilbird is the world's only fruit-eating bird that flies by night, and it steers through dark caverns by echolocation, using clicks that, unlike a bat's calls, people can hear. Local people knew it well: each year they harvested the plump chicks and rendered their fat for cooking and for torches.
Paintings and descriptions from the 1600s show the dodo as a fat, slow bird lumbering toward its own extinction. Its bones tell a different story. According to London's Natural History Museum, the dodo was leaner and more upright than those pictures suggest, about 70 centimeters tall and roughly 12 kilograms, or 26 pounds, and fairly agile. Its weight probably rose and fell with the seasons, which may explain the plump reports. It was a giant flightless pigeon, closely related to the Nicobar pigeon, and it was last sighted in 1662.
The secretary bird hunts venomous snakes by stamping on them with its exceptionally long legs, and a missed strike could be deadly. In a 2016 study, scientists worked with a male secretary bird named Madeleine at the Hawk Conservancy Trust in Hampshire, England, who had been trained to attack a rubber snake. They pulled the toy across a force plate hidden under artificial grass. His kicks struck with about 195 newtons, roughly five times his body weight, and each lasted an average of 15 milliseconds, about a tenth of the time it takes to blink.
Emperor penguins are the only animals that breed during the Antarctic winter, and only the males incubate the eggs. Facing blizzards of up to 200 kilometers per hour, they huddle, as many as 10 birds to a square meter. Inside, the temperature can reach 24 degrees Celsius, about 75 degrees Fahrenheit, and huddling cuts heat loss by as much as half. The huddle is also fair. Birds on the windward edge peel off and shuffle, eggs on their feet, down the sides to rejoin on the sheltered end, so each takes a turn in the warm center.
Many people believe wild lyrebirds imitate chainsaws, thanks largely to a famous scene in David Attenborough's series The Life of Birds, in which a lyrebird copies a camera's motor drive, a car alarm and a chainsaw. Two of the three lyrebirds filmed were captives. One, Chook of Adelaide Zoo, reputedly picked up hammers, drills and saws while the zoo's panda enclosure was built. A birdsong researcher writing in The Conversation reported that no known recording exists of a wild lyrebird mimicking machinery. Wild lyrebirds are superb mimics, but mostly of other birds.
The ostrich, the tallest and heaviest living bird, is famous for something it never does: it does not bury its head in the sand. When danger threatens and it cannot run away, an ostrich flops to the ground and lies still with its head and neck flat in front of it. Its pale head and neck blend with the soil, so from a distance the head seems to have vanished. Usually it simply runs, sprinting at up to 43 miles per hour, about 70 kilometers per hour, on feet with only two toes.
Estimates of a peregrine falcon's diving speed once ranged from 70 to 300 miles per hour, and nobody had measured it directly. Falconer Ken Franklin found a way. In a series of dives in 1999, he released his falcon Frightful from a Cessna at 17,000 feet and then skydived alongside her as she chased a lure. Altimeters on the falcon, the lure, Franklin and a cameraman were compared after each jump. Frightful was reportedly clocked at 242 miles per hour, about 389 kilometers per hour, faster than any other animal ever measured.
In October 2022, a five-month-old bar-tailed godwit wearing satellite tag number 234684 left Alaska and flew straight across the Pacific Ocean. It landed at Ansons Bay in northeast Tasmania 11 days and one hour later, having covered about 13,560 kilometers, or 8,425 miles, without stopping for food or rest. Guinness World Records lists it as the longest nonstop migration recorded for a bird. Before such flights, godwits feed for two months in Alaska and can shrink their internal organs to make room for energy-rich fat.
3A lifetime of flying equal to three Moon round trips
On the tile: Arctic Tern2010
Arctic terns weigh little more than 100 grams, yet they chase the summer sun from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back. In a study published in 2010, researchers fitted terns breeding in Greenland and Iceland with geolocators weighing just 1.4 grams. Their round trips to Antarctica's Weddell Sea averaged 70,900 kilometers, about 44,000 miles, nearly twice the distance usually cited. Since Arctic terns can live more than 30 years, one bird may fly over 2.4 million kilometers in its lifetime, about three return journeys to the Moon.
In 1956, biologist Chandler Robbins put a band on a Laysan albatross nesting on Midway Atoll in the Pacific. She had already laid an egg, and these albatrosses do not usually breed until they are at least five years old. Named Wisdom, she is the oldest known wild bird. At an age of at least 74, she hatched another chick in early 2025, having likely outlived at least three mates. Biologists estimate she has laid 50 to 60 eggs and flown roughly 3.7 million miles.
The world's smallest bird lives only in Cuba. The bee hummingbird is about two and a quarter inches long, and half of that is bill and tail. It weighs less than two grams, less than a dime, and Guinness World Records puts males at about 1.6 grams. People often mistake it for a bee. The female builds a nest barely an inch across and lays eggs about the size of a coffee bean. The bird's wings beat about 80 times a second, and up to 200 times during courtship flights.
Madagascar's elephant birds, extinct for around 1,000 years, are the largest birds known to have lived. The biggest stood about 3 meters, nearly 10 feet, tall. Their eggs held about 2 gallons, as much as 150 to 180 chicken eggs, and were larger than any dinosaur's. For a long time, scientists thought the closest relative of New Zealand's small kiwi was the emu. In 2014, ancient DNA showed it is actually the elephant bird, and that both of these flightless birds descend from ancestors that could fly.
Swifts spend most of their lives on the wing, and in 2016 researchers at Lund University in Sweden measured just how much. They fitted 13 common swifts with tiny data loggers that recorded whether each bird was flying. Some landed for short periods at night, yet even they spent more than 99.5 percent of their ten-month migration and winter season, south of the Sahara, in the air. Others never landed once in ten months. Lead researcher Anders Hedenström called it the longest flight phase known for any bird.
The Andean condor can weigh about 15 kilograms, or 33 pounds, making it the heaviest soaring bird on Earth. Researchers from Swansea University and from Argentina fitted condors in Patagonia with flight recorders that logged every wingbeat. The birds flapped for only about 1 percent of their flight time, and more than three quarters of that flapping came during takeoff. Once aloft, they rode rising air for hours. One condor flew for five hours without flapping at all, covering about 172 kilometers, more than 100 miles.
The largest bird's nest on record was built near St. Petersburg, Florida, by a pair of bald eagles and possibly their successors. When it was examined in 1963, it measured 2.9 meters, or 9 feet 6 inches, across and 6 meters, or 20 feet, deep, and it was estimated to weigh more than two metric tons, about 4,400 pounds. Australia's malleefowl build something even bigger, though not a nest in the usual sense: mounds for incubating their eggs that can reach 15 feet high and 35 feet across.
At an Oxford laboratory, scientists gave two New Caledonian crows, Betty and Abel, a straight wire and a hooked one for lifting a tiny bucket of meat from a clear tube. On the fifth trial, Abel took away the hook. Betty wedged the straight wire under some tape, pulled the other end with her beak to make a hook, and fished out the bucket. The 2002 report in Science made her famous. Later field work showed that wild crows bend their stick tools too; they are the only animals besides humans known to craft hooks in the wild.
It is often said that an owl can spin its head in a full circle. It cannot, but it comes close: owls can turn their heads up to 270 degrees in either direction. They need to, because their eyes are tubes rather than balls and cannot move in their sockets. In 2013 a Johns Hopkins team led by medical illustrator Fabian de Kok-Mercado showed how owls avoid tearing their neck arteries. Among other adaptations, the bony holes an artery passes through are about ten times wider than the artery, cushioning it during twists.
Each fall, Clark's nutcrackers in the mountains of the American West pry seeds from pine cones, carry them in a stretchy pouch under the tongue, and bury them for winter. The pouch can hold as many as 95 pinyon pine nuts at once. A single bird hides two to five seeds apiece in more than 10,000 places and can remember most of them seven to nine months later. The seeds it forgets matter too: whitebark pine cones do not open on their own, and forgotten caches sprout into the next generation of trees.
A starling murmuration can look like a single creature pouring across the sky. Starting in 2005, physicists Andrea Cavagna and Irene Giardina climbed to the rooftop of Rome's Palazzo Massimo with pairs of cameras and reconstructed flocks of more than 4,000 birds in three dimensions. They found that each starling pays attention to only about seven neighbors, whichever are nearest at that moment, matching their direction and speed. No leader is needed. Because every bird is linked to others, a turn at one edge can ripple across the whole flock.
Great frigatebirds spend weeks flying nonstop over the ocean, hunting flying fish and squid. Do they ever sleep up there? In a 2016 study, Niels Rattenborg of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology and colleagues fitted nesting frigatebirds in the Galápagos Islands with small recorders that tracked their brain waves on flights lasting up to ten days. The birds did sleep, sometimes with one half of the brain and sometimes both, mostly after sunset while soaring. But they averaged only 42 minutes of sleep a day in the air, compared with more than 12 hours on land.
The common cuckoo never raises its own young. A female slips into another bird's nest, often a reed warbler's or a meadow pipit's, removes one of the owner's eggs and lays one of her own, patterned to match. The laying can take as little as 10 seconds, and she may repeat it in 12 to 22 nests a season. The cuckoo chick hatches after about 12 days and pushes the host's eggs and young out of the nest. It grows to about four times the size of its reed warbler foster parents, which keep feeding it anyway.
In 2006, University of Washington wildlife scientist John Marzluff and his students trapped and banded seven crows on the Seattle campus while wearing a caveman mask. Afterward, anyone walking by in that mask was scolded and mobbed, while people with no mask or a different mask were generally ignored. The hostility spread beyond the crows that had been caught, and the share of crows scolding the caveman grew for seven years. Only after about 18 years did the crows lose interest, a year after the last of the captured birds had died.
When chickadees spot a perched predator, they call chick-a-dee-dee-dee to recruit other birds to mob it, and the ending carries a danger rating. In a 2005 study, University of Washington doctoral student Chris Templeton showed chickadees 15 live predators, from a cat to owls, and analyzed more than 5,000 calls. The calls varied with the predator's size, and small, agile raptors are the bigger threat: a pygmy owl drew as many as 23 added dees. Templeton compared a great horned owl chasing a chickadee to a Hummer trying to catch a Porsche. Red-breasted nuthatches, it turned out, eavesdrop on the code.
In Mozambique's Niassa National Reserve, Yao honey hunters summon a wild bird, the greater honeyguide, with a loud trill and grunt: brrr-hm. The bird leads them to bees' nests; the people take the honey, and the bird gets the wax. In 2016 Claire Spottiswoode of the University of Cambridge showed that the call raised the chance of being shown a nest from 16 to 54 percent. A 2023 study found that honeyguides in Tanzania, where Hadza hunters whistle instead, appeared 82 percent of the time for Hadza whistles but only 24 percent for Yao trills.
The story goes that on October 4, 1918, American soldiers of the Lost Battalion, surrounded by German troops and shelled by their own artillery, sent a homing pigeon named Cher Ami with a message giving their location. Army records do show that the bird reached its loft with one leg shot nearly off, a wound across the breast, and the message capsule dangling by a ligament. But a Signal Corps officer could find no record tying Cher Ami to the Lost Battalion. Those wartime records called the pigeon a hen. In 2021 Smithsonian DNA tests showed it was male.
In 1860 a flock of passenger pigeons estimated at more than 3.7 billion birds flew over Ontario. By 1910, after relentless hunting, the last known one was a lone female at the Cincinnati Zoo named Martha, after Martha Washington. Her keepers offered $1,000 to anyone who could find her a mate, and no one ever did. As she weakened, they lowered her perch to just a few inches off the ground. She died on September 1, 1914, and her body was packed in ice and shipped to the Smithsonian.
3Counting birds at Christmas instead of shooting them
On the tile: Bird CountDecember 25, 1900
Before 1900, many hunters marked Christmas with the side hunt: they chose sides, went out with guns, and whoever brought back the biggest pile of birds and other animals won. Ornithologist Frank Chapman, an early officer of the Audubon Society, proposed a Christmas bird census instead. On Christmas Day 1900, 27 birders held 25 counts, from Toronto to Pacific Grove, California, and tallied around 90 species. The Christmas Bird Count still runs every year from December 14 to January 5 and is one of the world's longest-running community science projects.
In the late 1800s, fashionable hats were trimmed with feathers and even whole birds, and plume hunters raided egret nesting colonies, leaving the chicks to starve. In 1896 Harriet Hemenway of Boston read an account of the slaughter and enlisted her cousin, Minna Hall. Shut out of the era's clubs and professional societies, the two campaigned over tea, working through the Blue Book, a directory of Boston's elite. About 900 women agreed to boycott feathers, and that year the cousins founded the Massachusetts Audubon Society. Their campaign helped build support for federal bird protection laws.
During World War II, psychologist B. F. Skinner watched a flock of birds maneuvering in formation and wondered whether pigeons could guide a missile. Doubtful defense officials still granted him $25,000 for Project Pigeon. He built a nose cone with three small screens and three tiny pigeon cockpits. Pigeons trained to recognize a target would peck at its image, and their pecks would steer the weapon. Despite a successful demonstration, officials stayed skeptical and ended the project. In 2024, long after his death, Skinner received an Ig Nobel Peace Prize for the work.
6Franklin never proposed the turkey as national bird
On the tile: National Bird1784Myth busted
A popular story says Benjamin Franklin wanted the turkey, not the bald eagle, as America's national bird. He never proposed it. In a 1784 letter to his daughter Sarah, which a National Archives commentary says he never sent, Franklin mocked an eagle design as looking more like a turkey, called the bald eagle a bird of bad moral character and praised the turkey as more respectable. The eagle had been on the Great Seal since 1782, yet it became the official national bird only when a law was signed on December 24, 2024.
When the Norwegian King's Guard performed at the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, Major Nils Egelien admired the king penguins at Edinburgh Zoo, whose stately march reminded him of guardsmen on parade. In 1972 he arranged for the regiment to adopt one as its mascot, named Nils Olav. The Guard visits every few years during the Tattoo and hands out promotions: corporal in 1982, a knighthood in 2008, brigadier in 2016 and major general in 2023. Today's holder of the title, Sir Nils Olav III, is the world's highest-ranking penguin.
On May 27, 1784, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart bought a pet starling and recorded the purchase in his expense book. Beside it he wrote out the tune the bird sang, a close match for the opening of the last movement of his new Piano Concerto in G major, K. 453, though with a couple of mistakes. Mozart noted that it was beautiful anyway. Nobody knows for sure how the bird learned a melody Mozart had finished only weeks before. When the starling died three years later, Mozart held a funeral with veiled mourners, hymns and a poem he wrote.
After an 1896 explosion at Tylorstown Colliery, scientist John Scott Haldane concluded that carbon monoxide was to blame and proposed taking sensitive animals into mines as early warnings. Canaries got the job, because they react to small amounts of the gas far sooner than people. Some cages even carried an oxygen tank: when a bird showed signs of poisoning, a miner closed the door and opened a valve to revive it. Many miners whistled to their canaries and treated them as pets. Britain phased the birds out in 1986 in favor of electronic gas detectors.