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The world is full of interesting animals, but every once in a while, we come across a species that forcefully reminds us just how outlandish and awesome wildlife can be.
The secretary bird (also known as Sagittarius serpentarius) happens to be one of those creatures that instantly grabs your attention as being completely awesome to behold, and perhaps even stranger than fiction. It's a bird of prey with the face of a mythical beast – perhaps to the point of being 笔辞办é尘辞苍-esque, and a body of a natural-born-killer.
IMAGE: Fodor's Travel Guide
Hard to miss.
The secretary bird is native to the sub-Saharan savannas and grasslands of Africa, and is mostly terrestrial – meaning that it spends most of its time on the ground rather than up in the air or in elevated positions.
A pretty large bird of prey, it stands at around four-feet tall on average, and gets most of its height from its lanky legs, which it uses to move around on land the majority of the time.
Its overall appearance is pretty striking, with gray and black feathers covering most of its body and a dash of bright yellow, red, or orange streaked across the front of its face, which contrasts heavily against its black head feathers and long eyelashes.
IMAGE: Good Times
It's still currently unclear where secretary bird gets its name from, but experts guess that it's named as such due to the way it tucks its head feathers behind its head just like how 19th Century lawyer's clerks would tuck quill pens behind their ears.
Killer stompers of the Sahara.
Every predator has a way to kill its prey, and the secretary bird's weapons of choice are its powerful legs.
While it does use its hooked beak to strike down prey from time to time, the bird has been more famously noted for using its legs to kick and stomp on potential meals, which includes small rodents, amphibians, and reptiles.
In some tests, secretary birds have been recorded landing kicks up to five times more forceful than their own body weight, even if from a stationary position, and their kicks are also incredibly fast – each foot touches its target for just 15 miliseconds.
IMAGE: Mark Kent on Flickr
But among all of its prey, the bird is known to particularly enjoy taking down snakes – even its scientific name Sagittarius serpentarius directly translates to "archer of snakes", and should tell you plenty about its hunting habits.
Secretary birds are exceptional snake killers due to a layer of scales on the lower legs that help protect against snake bites, and also their long wings that they use as a distraction against attacking snakes. When a snake tries to land a bite against a secretary bird, it'll probably find a bunch of feathers in its mouth instead.
On their way to becoming mythical.
While they look striking and are a sight to behold when in action, secretary birds are unfortunately already considered as being vulnerable to extinction according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species.
IMAGE: Safaris Africana
Plenty of its savanna-like habitat has been decimated and cleared for the breeding of livestock, which makes the availability of prey (and thus, food) quite scarce.
According to National Geographic, humans – most notably herders – have been known to disrupt the breeding patterns of secretary birds, and scientists have said that better monitoring will be needed to track the birds' population and determine just how much their numbers are declining.
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Cover image sourced from All About Birds and The Atlantic.
