Birds of the World Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which large flightless bird of the rainforests of New Guinea and far north-eastern Australia, sometimes called the most dangerous bird in the world, can inflict serious wounds with the long dagger-like claw on the inner toe of each powerful foot?

Question 2

Which strange bird of the South American rainforest has chicks born with two working claws on each wing, which they use to scramble back up to the nest after dropping into the water below to escape a predator, losing the claws as they mature?

Question 3

Which is the largest egg laid by any bird alive today, about fifteen centimetres long and weighing around one and a half kilograms, the equivalent of roughly two dozen hen's eggs, with a shell strong enough to stand on?

Question 4

What is the name for the rapid, more or less permanent learning by which a newly hatched duckling or gosling fixes on the first large moving object it sees, normally its mother, and then follows it everywhere?

Question 5

Which birds are kept, by a superstition said to date at least to the 17th century, at a fortress in a capital city, cared for by a uniformed guard with a special title, because the building and the kingdom are prophesied to fall if they ever depart?

Question 6

What is the name for the group of large flightless birds, including the ostrich, emu, cassowary, rhea and kiwi and the extinct moa and elephant bird, whose breastbone is a flat raft without the deep keel that anchors the flight muscles in other birds?

Question 7

Which comeback saw a national emblem climb from about four hundred nesting pairs in the lower United States in the 1960s to well over three hundred thousand birds, and be taken off the country's endangered list in 2007?

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About Birds of the World

This quiz is about birds: the famous ones and the strange ones, the families and orders, how a bird is built and how it behaves, the record-breakers, the great migrations, the extinctions and rescues, and the birds that live in myth and language. One hundred questions in four packs, each describing a bird, a group of birds, an anatomical or behavioural feature, a record or a conservation story, and asking you to name it from four choices of the same kind, then explaining it. It is a knowledge quiz, not the picture quiz that goes by the name Identify the Bird.

The first pack is the birds most people can already picture: the ostrich and the emu, the emperor penguin, the bald eagle and the peregrine falcon, the wandering albatross, the bee hummingbird, the kiwi and the dodo, the peacock, the flamingo, the owl, the strange hoatzin, the Arctic tern, the shoebill, the cassowary, the kakapo and the raven, plus what makes a bird a bird, feathers, and the fact that birds are living dinosaurs.

The second pack goes wider: the perching birds that make up more than half of all species, the bird voice box, the flightless ratites and the break-up of Gondwana, the godwit's record ocean crossing and the swift that never lands, the cuckoo's deceit, the mimicry of the lyrebird, the bowerbird's decorated stage, the birds of paradise and the lek, the mound-building megapodes, the difference between the helpless and the ready-to-run chick, the egg tooth and the giant ostrich egg, the hummingbird and the woodpecker and the toucan and the pelican, the two unrelated kinds of vulture, the condor, the snake-stamping secretarybird, the tall sarus and whooping cranes, imprinting and the V formation and the magnetic compass, the dawn chorus, the honeyguide that leads people to bees, the tool-using crow and the talking grey parrot, the swan and the goose and the duck, the wild ancestor of the chicken, the turkey and the Franklin myth, the lost passenger pigeon and great auk and moa, the abundant quelea and the message-carrying pigeon.

The third pack is records, extinctions and birds in culture: Darwin's finches, the Lord God woodpecker, the phoenix, the rediscovered takahe and the macaw brought back from extinction in the wild, the coal-mine canary, the Shakespeare starlings loosed on America, the eggshell-thinning pesticide and Silent Spring, the Tower ravens, the dove of peace, the Miracle on the Hudson, Audubon and the Christmas Bird Count, twitching and the big year, the kiwi as a nickname, the toll on island birds, the bald eagle's comeback, bird flu, the hummingbird's Gulf crossing, the collective nouns, and how many kinds of bird there are.

The fourth pack fills in more of the family: pigeon crop milk, the kingfisher that shaped a bullet train, the swiftlet whose spit becomes soup, the cave-dwelling oilbird, the bar-headed goose over the Himalayas, the poisonous pitohui, the sociable weaver's apartment block, the leaf-sewing tailorbird, the walled-in hornbill, the quetzal that names a currency, the balloon-throated frigatebird, the killdeer's broken-wing act, the green pigment of turacos, the hibernating poorwill, the seabird salt gland, the wishbone, the alula, the coughed-up pellet, migratory restlessness, and the budgerigar.

The wrong answers are always other birds or bird terms of the same kind. About a quarter of the questions carry a photograph of a distant flock, a feather or a nest, chosen because it shows no particular species and so cannot point to any of the four options. Facts have been checked against standard reference works.