Fatu-Liva Bird

The Oo-er bird, which makes its home in Australia, has one remarkable quality. It lays square eggs. Its name comes from the sound it makes every time it lays one: "oo-er!"

Although few details are known about the Oo-er, we know more about the Fatu-Liva, a square-egg-laying bird found on the South Pacific Filbert Islands (discovered by the American explorer Walter E. Traprock during the early twentieth century). The Fatu-Liva's eggs, besides being square, are snow-white and polka-dotted. If threatened, Fatu-Livas are capable of laying these eggs while aloft. The eggs then drop with great force, inflicting serious damage on anything unfortunate enough to be down below. While exploring the Filberts, Traprock succeeded in taking a picture of a Fatu-Liva nest in the wild, containing a collection of the bird's eggs (see thumbnail).

It is highly probable that the Oo-er and Fatu-Liva are related species. In fact, the two may be the same species. Most likely Oo-ers, at some point in the distant past, migrated to the Filbert Islands. Further study is required to confirm this hypothesis.

It should be noted, however, that upon Traprock's return to America, many skeptics publicly doubted the reality of the square-egg-laying Fatu-Liva. (They even claimed that Traprock was the pseudonym of George Shepard Chappell, a reporter for Vanity Fair magazine, and that the Filbert Islands didn't exist either!) In response to these accusations, Traprock commented that, "Skeptics have said that it would be impossible to lay a square egg. To which the author is justly entitled to say: 'The camera never lies.'"

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