Birds & Birding

Have you ever actually looked at a turkey?

Not the trussed-and-stuffed bird in the middle of your Thanksgiving dinner table, but a live, kicking, glaring American Wild Turkey? They’re cool, weird, and impressively ugly.

When I say turkeys are ugly, I mean it with love. As a birder, I delight in birds that are, shall we say, conventionally unattractive. But the turkey in our back yard isn’t the only ugly bird out there — with 10,000 avian species on Earth, the possibilities for ugly are endless.

So here are our picks for 10 other fantastically weird, bald, and gratuitously ugly birds.