Now Unfortunately Extinct, The Portrait-Sitting Chicken Was A Very Important Breed For Aspiring Models

Now unfortunately extinct, the Portrait-Sitting Chicken was a very important breed for aspiring models back during the early days of photography. Unlike oil painting where both artist and model could take breaks while working on a single image, early cameras required models to sit perfectly still or risk completely ruining the image. While not ordinarily photographed themselves, Portrait-Sitting Chickens were used to train aspiring models to remain perfectly still or risk having an angry flapping mess tangled up in their hair.

Unlike others in the family Ardeidae, the Great Blue Heron completely lacks cervical vertebrae. This (in combination with a great love for limoncello and diet primarily consisting of small fish and rodents) has earned it the sobriquet of ‘Avian Danny DeVito’.

Described as ‘Uber for West Coast Marsh and Grassland inhabitants’ by a Forbes.com listicle, White-tailed Kites can be called upon most hours of the day to ferry around voles, mice, rabbits, and even occasionally snakes and smaller birds. A rigorous background screening process means fares can rest easy as only 15% of rides end in gruesome murder, which cannot be said of their human counterpart.

You may remember hearing about caterpillars tricking predators by mimicking more toxic caterpillars, but biologists in South America have discovered something amazing: a caterpillar that mimics a baby bird. This allows them to ‘flip the script’ and rather than worry about being eaten, they are fed regularly by the Cinereous Mourner whose nests they parasitize.

The Loggerhead Shrike brutally silences political dissidents by means of public impalement before dismembering and ultimately consuming those who would dare attempt to change the status quo. Above, a grasshopper’s head and spine are removed from its freshly-impaled body for suggesting perhaps there should be fewer impalements.

Closed for Lent

The Academy of Bird Sciences will be reopening on 28 March 2016 after celebrating the hatching of our lord and saviour the Eastern Kingback Phoenix. This formerly widespread bird has never been photographed and is officially extinct, but ancient prophecy handed down through millenia tells of the day it shall rise once more to usher in a new era of peace and prosperity for all birds, flighted and flightless alike. If you’re curious as to what Lent has to do with it, Eastern Kingback Phoenix eggs have an incubation period of six weeks give or take a couple of days. They are laid sometime between February and early March and since they nearly unerringly hatch on what would later be called Easter Sunday the first council of Nicaea decreed their ‘lay date’ to be the start of Lent. So, I’m packing my bags and scouring all of the traditional nesting places of Eastern Kingback Phoenixes in the hopes that I get to be the lucky ornitholobiolographer who gets to record the first documented hatching in over fifteen hundred years. It’s gonna be difficult though as they usually nested near colonies of Party Chickens which are nearly extinct in the wild thanks to consumerist greed for basket fill, so I’m going to have my searching cut out for me!