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This fierce beauty is the Secretary Bird, a bird of prey from sub-Saharan Africa with killer kicks and iconic lashes
(lemmy.world)
With legs built for speed and power, the Secretary bird hunts snakes by stomping them with a force of 195 Newtons, enough to kill in milliseconds.
Despite their raptor status, they hunt mostly on foot and can walk up to 30 km a day.
Link to the Wikipedia article. It's a featured article*, and there's a subsection that goes over how the species has recently become endangered.
NOOOOOOOOOOOO
Yeah, the IUCN listed it as vulnerable in 2016 and then endangered in 2020. "As a population, the secretarybird is mainly threatened by loss of habitat due to fragmentation by roads and development and overgrazing of grasslands by livestock." So cars and animal agriculture – both largely unnecessary in modern society – fuck the planet at a micro- and a macroscopic scale. Not surprising, but tragic nonetheless.
brb, i gotta go cry