Hoatzin!

BirdNote^® 
Hoatzin! 
Written by Dennis Paulson

This is BirdNote!

     [Sounds of a canoe being paddled]

Imagine paddling slowly along the edge of a forested oxbow lake in eastern Ecuador. Suddenly, an ungainly bird the size of a chicken takes off from an overhanging shrub and flaps awkwardly into the next clump of bushes. It’s a Hoatzin (pronounced HWAT-zin), one of the strangest birds in the world.

     [Hoatzin call]

With scraggly crest and long tail, it looks like a bird put together by a committee. Bright blue facial skin and piercing red eyes add to its exotic appearance. But that’s not the only odd thing about this bird. The Hoatzin is a vegetarian, filling its stomach with leaves, and then resting and digesting for long periods.

     [Hoatzin calls]

The wheezy calls of a group sound more like a troupe of monkeys than a flock of birds. If you were to watch closely, you’d see more of them, as they’re highly social. They nest over the water, and when a chick is disturbed by a predator, it drops out of the nest with a splash and climbs back into the vegetation, using vestigial claws on its wings. These claws are unique in the bird world.

     [Sounds of a canoe being paddled]

You can see Hoatzins almost anywhere along the tributaries of the Amazon River. Or get a look at one – including one of those chicks with claws on its wings – on our website, BirdNote.org. I'm Michael Stein.

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Call of the Hoatzin 117903 provided by The Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York, recorded by D.W. Finch; Canoe paddling recorded by C. Peterson, Ontario.

© 2014 Tune In to Nature.org     June 2017 / 2025
Narrator: Michael Stein

ID# HOAT-01b-2017-6-14   HOAT-01b