Ahh the bird human race , full of fantastically beautiful species that aviate , float , and even just take the air ( look at youkiwis ) across a vast raiment of Earth ’s diverse habitats . While some species enter the book books for their awe-inspiring feat of endurance , soar up for dayswithout touching the ground , we take a closer looking at the heaviest bird to grace our sky .

Meet the kori bustard ( Ardeotis kori).The males weigh between 11 - 19 kilograms ( 24 - 42 lbf. ) with a wingspan of up to2.75 meters(9 feet ) . Sexually dimorphic , the female are roughly half of that size , explains theSmithsonian National Zoo .

TheGuinness Book Of Recordsstates that the large confirmed specimen weighed 18.14 kilograms ( 40 quid ) . The bird was shot in South Africa and was document in 1936 .

These skirt hold out in two distinct ranges in South and East Africa and drop most of their time on the basis foraging . Their dieting include a wide-cut range from insects , reptilian , and small rodents to seeds , berry , and roots . TheInternational Union for Conservation of Naturelists the kori bustard asNear Threatenedand describes them as “ mostly sedentary , but does undertake local trend ” .

The 2nd threatening fly bird is also a species of bustard – the peachy bustard ( Otis tarda ) . They press only slightly less than the kori bustard at around a maximum of 6–18 kilograms ( 13 - 39 pounds ) . Unlike the kori bustard , which does not transmigrate and rarely flies very far at one sentence , great bustards were revealed to have a migration round trip of over4,000 kilometers(roughly 2,485 miles ) between their education grounds in Mongolia and their wintertime in China .

Great bustard , like the kori bustard , show a great deal ofsexual dimorphismand might have thelargest size of it differencebetween Male and females of any bird species . The Male weigh up to four times the exercising weight of the female person .

In concluded direct contrast , the world ’s sound hiss that ca n’t fly is the southerly African subspecies of the common ostrich . The South African ostrich ( Struthio camelus australis ) can reportedly weigh 156 kilograms ( 343 pounds ) .

Of course , with all this talk of chick , we ’ve forgotten the enceinte flying mammals , the fly foxes , which weigh a comparatively measly 0.5 - 1.0 kilograms ( 1 - 2.2 Syrian pound ) look on the precise metal money . There maybe be Bob Hope though for a larger flying mammal yet as new research has reveal thathipposare in fact take to the skies .