All shapes and sizes in the animal kingdom are beautiful in their own way, but some of these bird's feet look like caricatures drawn by a child...
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Here are 5 weirdest bird feet.
5 weirdest bird feet
African Jacana
These waders increase their range in the wetlands of sub-Saharan Africa by employing their extraordinarily long toes, with equally long nails, to walk on top of the floating aquatic vegetation. The wide spread of their feet distributes their weight so that the plants don’t give way under them, and their extended claws grip the stems to propel themselves along.
Should they happen to fall in, they are good swimmers, and often employ that tactic to evade predators, particularly when they are chicks. But fishing and catching insects is easier while standing on a lily pad.
Coot
If any feet look less like belonging to the animal they appear to be attached to, it’s the appendages of the coot.
Pale grey at the bottom of yellow legs and a black body, with curious lobed flaps surrounding the toes, they look like a child’s attempt at drawing feet with a thick and clumsy felt-tip pen. But they serve the coot well because, unlike a duck’s webbed foot that propels it through the water but leads to awkward walking on land, these feet work well as paddles but are also bendy on land so the bird can step elegantly and speedily along the riverbank.
Ostrich
These large birds are unique in the avian world in only having two toes on each foot. All other birds have either three or four, depending on the species.
The toes consist of a large one with a nail that looks almost like a hoof, to dig in and gain purchase on the ground, and a small, bulbous one without a nail to act as a stabiliser. Together they help to propel the ostrich forward at great speed and for long periods of time. It’s not unusual to record the birds travelling at more than 35 miles an hour (56km/h) for half an hour at a time.
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Woodpecker
Unlike most other birds, woodpeckers spend most of their time clinging vertically to tree trunks rather than perching on branches or walking on the ground. Hence their specialist feet which, instead of having three toes that point forwards and one backwards, have two facing to the front and two to the back. This gives them a more secure grip on the bark to climb.
This toe arrangement is called zygodactyl and in the avian world it is only shared with parrots, owls, cuckoos and ospreys – the latter uses its two-front, two-back toe configuration to good effect in carrying a slippery fish back to the nest.
Blue-footed Booby
The striking feature of this seabird is revealed in the name. While other birds might be seen to have pale bluey-grey coloured feet, this booby species has the most vibrant turquoise to aquamarine ones. Its feet are a good indicator of the bird’s health – the brighter the blue, the more robust the booby. This is particularly important in male birds seeking a mate, as knowing your chick will be inheriting good, healthy genes is the important factor in the female’s choice of partner.
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The males play on this fact and use their feet as a central feature in their mating displays, waving them about and strutting to show them off. The blue colouring is caused by carotenoid pigments ingested from its diet of fresh fish. These are the same pigments that colour a flamingo’s feet, but because of the particular arrangement of the booby’s skin collagens, in their feet and legs they appear blue rather than pink.
