5 Insane Ways Science is Humiliating Birds (With WTF Images)

Oh, come on, really? That can't be a bird. It looks like something a toddler hastily glued together after accidentally exploding a bird.

Amazingly, there actually is a living thing inside that mess of feathers, and its state is not the result of multiple little girls with untethered access to a curling iron, a blow dryer, and several packs of extensions. It's a budgie, and the reason it looks like a failed loofah design is because of a debilitating defect called feather duster syndrome. How does one get FDS? Inbreeding. Lots and lots of inbreeding.

Wild budgies, despite originating from Australia, are not gigantic hulking beasts bent on destroying everybody. No, they actually look pretty normal:

They're quite adorable, and have proven to be incredibly popular as household pets. However, wild budgies haven't been exported from Australia since 1894. They have to come from somewhere, though, so breeders have been encouraging incest ever since. Two-hundred-plus years of the ultimate family reunion? What could possibly go wrong?

While it doesn't happen all the time, feather duster syndrome causes the feathers, already curlier than on normal budgies, to keep growing and growing, until they look like the tiny bird-splosions you see here. Obviously, this is in no way beneficial to the bird; they can barely see, can't fly, could very well be deaf, and have the bird version of Down's syndrome. Add a compromised immune system due to the stress of growing out all these feathers, and we have ourselves a birdie that rarely lives for more than a year.

But that hasn't stopped pet shops from selling them, and for a very high price, because look at it.

Luckily (or not) online breeders have provided instructions on how to go about creating your own feather duster, like they're Pokemon or Chocobos. We hope you're up for breeding a new one every six months or so, because remember, they die quick.

OK, this is probably going too far in the other direction.

Unless you're a magical chicken that can somehow read Cracked articles, you probably have no use for chicken feathers. You can't eat them, and they're not strong enough to dip into a vial of ink and write an old-timey letter with. So why bother with the damn things at all? That's exactly what scientists in Israel must be thinking, as they have successfully bred a bunch of "bald chickens." They claim this will help farmers by saving time (no more plucking) and energy (no need to ventilate or air-condition the coop if the chicken has no chance of overheating), and it will help breed bigger, meatier chickens, since cool chickens tend to grow faster.

Which is all well and good, except they look like, well, this:

So how did they create this bawking hellspawn? Well, apparently there is a gene that, when mutated, naturally produces featherless chickens. So, the scientists simply took one of these naked mutants, cross-bred it with a regular feathered chicken, and then cackled maniacally into the cold, dark night.

In addition to looking silly, naked chickens actually have a host of downsides. Due to their exposed everything, these chickens are largely unable to deal with cold, sunburn quite easily, and are a nice, ripe target for mosquitoes. If being unable to cope with much of the world's weather isn't enough, naked chickens have virtually no hope of finding a mate, since they use their feathers to flap their wings and look all macho and shit around the hens.

But hey, they're delicious, so they have that going for them at least. Naked chickens reportedly contain less fat (the feathers produce subcutaneous fat underneath the skin) and produce leaner meat. So if you have no issues with eating something that will haunt your dreams for years to come, by all means, chow down.

Once again, it may take a moment to work out what exactly you're seeing there. It's not a bird with its face buried in its wing -- that's its chest, and this is what it looks like all the time. It's a type of pigeon that is appropriately known as the Amsterdam balloon cropper (or Holle cropper). It's advertised as a "fancy" variant, because apparently being able to chew on your own stomach is just the fanciest thing imaginable.

Developed in Holland to look like "a round ball on legs," balloon croppers are mainly used as show birds, and are held to a very exacting set of standards in order to be considered a champion of the breed. Which is clearly something the bird strives to be. Points are given for carriage, body, color, and, most importantly, a spectacular sense of balance.

According to the Pigeon Club of Arizona, "It carries its body horizontally and stands on its toes in an alert jaunty manner with its head carried well back toward its tail. A vertical line through the eye falls behind the foot position." Because nothing says jaunty and graceful like a mutated spine that's been twisted into an ampersand. The club goes on to say, "The Holle cropper is a small, delicate, short but broad cropper with extraordinary grace and liveliness." Which is interesting, because in every single picture and video we've seen of the damn thing, it's just standing there, often with a terrified look in its eyes, like it's just realized what it is, and that death really needs to get a move on here.

Seriously, there's no way this bird can run off or fly away at the slightest sound, like a normal pigeon would. It can barely see past its own chest! So it's pretty much stuck there until its owner decides to move it somewhere else. Or tip it over, depending on how big of a dick the owner is.

Yes, crested ducks do look they're wearing powdered wigs from the 1700s, and yes, we too made tut-tut ol' chap sounds the first time we saw it. But that crest is actually a bunch of feathers growing out of what's basically a tumor. So forgive the duck if he's not laughing along with you.

A crested duck can sometimes occur naturally, but science has discovered how to breed them at will, and so they do, because advancing human understanding of the universe just gets boring after a while. Seriously, crested ducks offer absolutely nothing useful, aside from looking goddamned hilarious.

These poor unfortunate souls look this way due to a genetic mutation that causes a skull deformity, which allows fatty tissue to come out of a gap in their cranium. Then feathers grow on top of the tissue, creating the dignified look of a waddling English barrister. So yeah, it's actually kind of gross.

Not so gross, though, that breeders have been dissuaded from exploiting it for centuries, especially since the mutation can be, and has been, inserted into just about every breed of duck imaginable. Here's a drake with a crest that looks like a turban:

And here's an all-black duck, complete with black crest, because anything else would just look silly:

Naturally, they're all for sale. If you want one for your very own, just fork over $8.50 and it's yours. They apparently make great pets, as long as you don't think too hard about that whole disgusting tumor thing.

Bullshit. That is not a real photo. Someone has (badly) Photoshopped a cheap toupee onto the head of a random canary.

Well, if so, they did it a lot:

This particular variety of nonsense, called the crested Stafford canary, was developed some time in the 1970s, burst onto the English bird show circuit in 1987, and joined the American ranks in 1992. And every single one of them looks like they got male pattern baldness and tried to cover it up with a cheap, ill-fitting hairpiece they found in an alley.

The Stafford was designed to be a rare "type" canary. This means it was "bred for physical characteristics rather than color or song." No shit -- if we had a bird with such a glorious mop, we'd exploit the shit out of it, too; who cares if it can sing? Although, if you can turn your attention away from its head for a minute, you'll see they actually can croon:

So maybe you want one, if only to stare at it all day and think of yet more jokes about its hairdo. Well, good luck. These things are so popular that breeders can't keep up with the demand.

E. Reid Ross also writes at Man Cave Daily and defiles comics with a few friends over at RealToyGun.com.

Related Reading: Before you start feeling too sorry for our feathered friends, you should read this article about evil avians. Did you know the shrike impales its victims on spikes? And if that isn't creepy enough, some birds have superpowers -- the lyrebird can mimic your voice perfectly. None of that "Polly want a cracker" nonsense. And speaking of talking birds, wild cockatoos are teaching each other swear words.