Freaky Animal Facts
The female boomslang, the type of African tree snake, looks so much like a tree branch that birds - its main prey - will land right on it.
Nine-banded armadillos have identical quadruplets every time they give birth.
The laziest mammals are armadillos, sloths and possums. They spend 80% of their lives sleeping or dozing.
The koala, which is not actually a bear but a primitive marsupial that has existed in its present form for more than a million years, gets almost all the liquid it needs from licking due off tree leaves.
Roadrunners take a no-holds-barred approach to killing rattlesnakes. They jab the snakes with their sharp bills, shake them, body slam them, and then administer a final peck in the head before devouring the prey head first.
Vultures sometimes eat so much they can't take off in flight.
The Emperor Penguin of the Antarctic has equality of the sexes down pat: the female lays the egg, but the male has a brood pouch-- a roll of skin and feathers between his legs that drops over the egg. He must then protect the egg and keep it still for two months until it hatches and the female returns to feed the chick.
When the male snowy owl wishes to arouse a female, he dances while swinging a dead lemming from his beak.
The oldest bird on record was Cocky, a cockatoo, who died in the London Zoo at the age of 82.
Every year approximately 3000 birds collide with US Air Force planes, causing an estimated $60 million in damages.
[From The Book of Unusual Facts]
