Explore every episode of the podcast Dumb Stupid Birds

The shoebill stands five feet tall in a Central African swamp, does not move for hours, and hunts by falling forward onto things. It is classified as Vulnerable. There are fewer than 5,300 left. It looks like something that should have gone extinct with the dinosaurs, and it stares at you like it knows that.

The blue jay is loud, obnoxious, impersonates hawks for personal gain, and is not actually blue. It is also, incidentally, responsible for replanting the entire eastern deciduous forest of North America after the last ice age. You're welcome.

The belted kingfisher is top-heavy, ragingly territorial, named after a Greek myth, and the only bird in North America where the female is more colorful than the male. It nests inside a tunnel it digs with its face. It has been doing this, loudly, near every river on the continent, for at least 600,000 years.

The ostrich is the largest bird alive, the fastest two-legged animal on Earth, and the only bird whose eyes are literally bigger than its brain. It does not bury its head in the sand. What it actually does is considerably more interesting and considerably more violent.

The greater sage grouse is the largest grouse in North America, eats almost nothing but a single shrub, and every spring performs a dawn courtship ritual so elaborate it has its own name, its own ancestral venue, and its own sound that no other animal on Earth makes. It has also lost 80% of its population since 1965 and nobody outside the American West knows it exists.

The greater roadrunner does not go beep beep, cannot outrun a coyote, and is not fast. What it can do is kill a rattlesnake with coordinated ambush tactics, survive a desert on almost no water, and leave footprints specifically designed - by accident - to confuse evil spirits.

The peregrine falcon: two hundred miles per hour, thirty-six ounces, extinct east of the Mississippi in 1965, nesting on your office building today. The greatest conservation comeback in the history of American wildlife.

The American woodcock is a round, leaf-colored forest bird with its ears on its face, currently shutting down Bryant Park with a dance that isn't actually a dance.

The mallard is the most successful waterfowl on Earth, ancestor of nearly every domestic duck alive, and the one bird that decided to colonize human civilization from the inside.