Birds of the World Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which tall, long-necked wading bird feeds with its head held upside down in the water, pumping mud through comb-like plates in its bent bill to strain out tiny shrimp and algae, and nests in dense colonies on the mud of harsh salt and soda lakes?

Question 2

Which bird, now numbering in the hundreds of millions across the continent, is descended from about a hundred individuals released in New York's Central Park in the early 1890s by a man reportedly determined to introduce to America every bird mentioned in the works of Shakespeare?

Question 3

Which nocturnal, fruit-eating bird of northern South America and Trinidad roosts by day deep inside caves in large noisy colonies, navigates the darkness by echolocation and a keen sense of smell, and flies out at night to pluck the fruit of palms and laurels on the wing?

Question 4

Which small nightjar of the dry western United States and Mexico is the only bird known to spend weeks in a state close to true hibernation, its body temperature and heartbeat falling far down while it lies torpid in a sheltered rock crevice through spells of winter cold?

Question 5

Which wild bird of the forests of South and South-East Asia, a ground-feeding relative of the pheasants with a red comb and long arching tail, was domesticated thousands of years ago into the farmyard chicken?

Question 6

Which large North American game bird, domesticated by peoples of Mexico long before European contact and then carried back across the Atlantic, took its confusing English name from the country traders were thought to have brought it through?

Question 7

Which word, beyond the flightless bird itself, is the affectionate informal name both for the people of New Zealand and, among currency traders, for the New Zealand dollar?

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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.