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We have a variety of wildlife in our yard, mainly squirrels and chipmunks and a lot of birds. My favorite are the wild turkeys, then cranes and herons (can’t tell them apart), ducks, then cardinals and woodpeckers, then robins and others. Not so favorite are bluejays (I like their coloring but they are not friendly to the other birds) and Canada geese (messy and noisy and mean, no redeeming qualities).

I’ve noticed that birds have 3 main ways of walking. They either waddle or hop or strut. And by strut I mean they can’t walk without moving their head fore and aft.

Good examples of these categories of bird walking are these:
Waddle – duck
Strut – chicken
Hop – any of those little birds that hang around the food court at the amusement park

I pointed this out to my son, that birds have 3 ways of walking. And as we paid attention to birds walking for the next day or two, oddly enough we found one bird that seemed to walk like any other biped. Except he didn’t swing his arms when walking. But his gait was just one step in front of the other.

We didn’t figure out what kind of bird it was – it was a smallish bird, which I was expecting to hop everywhere, but it just walked. Since then, I looked up other birds, and a good example of a bird that walks normally is a flamingo.

I haven’t figured out what goes into making a bird need to walk one way versus the others. If a biology major needs a research topic, feel free to use this.

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