19 birds containing the letter K — each with origin, classification, and notes.
Below are birds that contain the letter K anywhere in the name. Each of the 19 birds below opens to a full profile.
A small, fearless North American songbird with distinctive black cap and bib — beloved feeder birds known for sophisticated alarm calls that encode information about predator size and danger level.
The most numerous bird on Earth — over 30 billion at any given time — domesticated from the Southeast Asian red junglefowl about 8,000 years ago and now central to every poultry-eating cuisine on Earth.
A loud, intelligent Australasian parrot with a distinctive crest of feathers — including the most affectionate parrot species and some of the most ecologically destructive flocks, with several species critically endangered.
A medium-sized bird famous for its distinctive call (the basis of cuckoo clocks) and brood parasitism — laying eggs in other species' nests to be raised by unwitting foster parents.
The most widespread and recognizable duck species on Earth, ancestor of nearly all domestic duck breeds, and a study in iridescent green and chestnut sexual dimorphism.
A bold, predatory songbird that behaves like a miniature raptor — the great grey shrike is pale grey, black and white, perching prominently on the tops of bushes and lone trees, scanning for prey; famous for impaling prey on thorns to create a larder, it is a scarce winter visitor to Britain, with individual birds often returning to the same heathland site for multiple winters.
A general name for medium-sized day-flying raptors — including the Cooper's, sharp-shinned, and red-tailed hawks of North America — built for speed in forest pursuit and for soaring on thermals.
A small falcon famous for hovering motionless into the wind above roadsides, moorland, and open fields while scanning the ground below for mice, voles, and large insects — one of the most recognizable birds of European and Asian countryside.
A small, jewel-bright Eurasian fishing bird that hovers above water and dives at over 40 km/h to catch small fish, the inspiration for the bullet train's nose cone design.
New Zealand's iconic flightless bird — about the size of a chicken, with hair-like feathers, a long sensitive beak with nostrils at the tip, and the relatively largest egg of any bird, sometimes 20% of the female's body weight.
A medium-sized gray songbird famous for mimicking dozens of other species — capable of imitating 200+ songs and sounds across a lifetime, with the northern mockingbird as Harper Lee's literary symbol of innocence.
A large pheasant native to South Asia whose male sports a vivid iridescent train and elaborate fan display, the textbook example of sexual selection in evolution.
Britain's most spectacular conservation success story — a large, elegant, fork-tailed raptor that was reduced to a tiny remnant population of a few dozen birds in Wales by the 1930s and has since been reintroduced across England and Scotland, now numbering thousands; the russet-red body, pale head, and deeply forked tail make it unmistakable in flight.
A small, lively finch of conifers and birch woodland — the male is a bright greenish-yellow bird with a streaked black cap; siskins form acrobatic feeding flocks in alder and birch trees in winter, and have become one of the most popular garden feeders in Britain since learning to exploit nyjer seed feeders.
A brown farmland bird famous for its sustained, complex hovering song — the male rises vertically to 300 metres and sings continuously for up to an hour, the quintessential sound of the open countryside in Romantic poetry and folk culture.
A large long-legged wading bird famous in folklore for delivering babies — about 19 species worldwide ranging from the white stork's chimney-top nests to the marabou's massive 3 m wingspan.
A large North American gamebird domesticated by Indigenous Americans, surviving through the European-introduced Christmas-and-Thanksgiving traditions, with wild populations recovering to abundance after near-extinction.
The forest phantom of the twilight — the woodcock is almost never seen by day, relying on extraordinary cryptic plumage of dead-leaf brown, chestnut, and black bars to become invisible on the woodland floor; it emerges at dawn and dusk to probe soft ground for earthworms with its long, sensitive bill; males perform a distinctive display flight called roding over woodland in the breeding season.
A large, crow-sized woodpecker with a vivid red crest, the model for Woody Woodpecker; chisels rectangular holes deep into wood with a series of head-snapping impacts.
Try birds that start with K, or end with K. Or browse the full birds index.