Not Just a Stinky Turkey

Among the most primitive birds ever, hoatzins were a joy to see everyday in the Amazon Rainforest. They are fairly approachable and there was often a group chilling out on some logs in the lagoon near where we stayed. Hoatzins are called 'stinky turkeys or stink birds' by the natives. Not the most flattering name, but they apparently have a prolonged digestion which causes them to stink a bit like cattle and they apparently taste bad. I think they are really pretty with their faux punk hairstyle

They are not great flyers rating only slightly better then chickens. They are weird because their chicks have claws on their wing digits. This is to help them scramble through the trees before they get their flight feathers and helps tie modern bird evolution to earlier forebears like the Archaeopteryx.

This bird causes arguments among birders and zoologists. It has very strange phylogenetic relationships and doesn't really fit in well in any taxon. Perhaps due to the oddness of its chicks and its other very primitive features no conclusive evolutionary hypothesis has been proposed. With its DNA sequence the situation only gets more confusing. Most zoologists palce it into an order all its own the Opisthocomiformes.