Marabou Stork
The world’s ugliest bird? My nomination is for the Marabou Stork, a bird so hideous even its mother couldn’t like it. Marginally the biggest of all the storks, it’s a huge, bald-headed bird with the added feature of two extraordinary air sacs, a bright red one at the base of the hind neck, and a pinkish, pendulous one that hangs below the neck. Even its habits do nothing to endear it, as it generally congregates around dead animals or rubbish tips. It’s not an active bird, as it likes nothing better than to loaf around, doing nothing very much, but it is an impressive flier, and will sometimes soar to great heights.
It must have something to do with being bald, for all the major contenders for the title of the world’s ugliest bird are follicly challenged. Here in Europe, we have a single bald bird, the aptly named (Northern) Bald Ibis. It’s an exceedingly rare bird in Europe, though it wasn’t always so. Today, there are tiny, reintroduced populations in both Spain and Austria, with the latter migrating to Italy for the winter.
With plumage as black as an undertaker’s coat (though in good light, you will see that it has a metallic green and purple gloss) and a bright red beak and face, which suggests that it has been on the booze, it’s a bird that has a certain beauty because of its sheer ugliness. Despite its name, it’s not really bald, for its nape feathers droop rather like an unkempt mane, a feature that its southern cousin, the Southern Bald Ibis, lacks.
Once one of the most endangered of North African/European birds, its population is slowly recovering, helped by conservation efforts in Morocco and the reintroduction projects in Europe. Though I have seen it in Morocco, I know it best from Andalucia, where there’s a small and easily viewed nesting colony on a roadside cliff at La Barca de Vejer, just outside the coastal town of Barbate (David Tomlinson).
Northern Bald Ibis – ugly but attractive in its own way
Roseate Spoonbill
Do ugly birds exist? Do they really? Some people may mention the Marabou Stork with its naked and warty pouch, others might gripe about the quarrelsome vultures, like the Eurasian Griffon, with their bad table manners and blood-covered heads. There are even people complaining bitterly about the lovely Leaf Warblers, although they have been called everything but ugly on this website. Boring, yes, ugly no, so they do not seem to fit the category either. Having postponed my verdict long enough, it is time to finally mention my ugly bird: the Roseate Spoonbill. In a family defining sheer elegance, this bird is ugly (Peter Penning, Photo by Erika Zambello).
Wood Stork
In southwestern Florida, where we winter, there are so many lovely waders. Egrets and herons are starting to show off their breeding plumage. Then, there is the Wood Stork. Soaring high above, it looks so impressive. A closer look reveals a homely bird. It has a naked, grey head and sports a heavy bill. It is plain white and black. It doesn’t even have any of the lacey aigrettes or feather tufts of the other waders. I nominate the Wood Stork for our ugly bird gallery (Leslie Kinrys).
“Gabán [Wood Stork] (Mycteria americana)” by barloventomagico is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
Knobbed Hornbill
One problem with being a late contributor to a collaborative post is that some of the obvious nominees have already been taken. So, the Marabou Stork was no longer an option for me.
Another is that just by participating in such a post, you already sort of highlight your not-quite-so-beautiful soul. For example, one of our regular writers replied to the request for a nomination by stating, “I … see all birds as beautiful. Even the grotesque and ill-proportioned, the awkwardly elongated and comically pot-bellied – I can’t see anything else but beauty!”
So, what is left for me when I can neither claim to have a beautiful soul nor select the Marabou Stork? Well, I cannot quite imagine anyone with just a slight sense of aesthetics will ever offer much praise for the Knobbed Hornbill, as seen on Sulawesi. It doesn’t even look much like it is real – all its features and colors are just too exaggerated. So, while defenders of evolution may come up with some lame excuse, such as “Trust me, it will look good in the forest canopy”, others will use the existence of this species as a way to point out that evolution may not be such a good idea after all (Kai Pflug).
Editor’s note: It is surprising how difficult it is to find contributors to a post on ugly birds. Is it really that all birds are beautiful, or are we just all too woke?
To prove my lack of wokeness I had a giggle about “knobbed”