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Pukeko Chick


Pukeko, or Australasian swamphen, is endemic bird in New Zealand and its surrounding region. Their large legs with disproportionately long toes are useful to traverse swamps and marshes without sinking.

What I made here is the chick version, infamous as "the damn bird" meme.

Design

I had the desire to fold swamp bird with long toes couple years ago. The most obvious structure would be bird base with border graft to add toes and elongate the neck/head. However it was boring and nothing was made. Then some time ago I saw this bird meme circulating online. It looks so goofy and sparked my interest once more. 

Using grafted bird base for this subject might be a bad idea since the toes are so long, which means we need large border graft, which also means the head will be too long. Even if fish base is used instead of a bird base, we still have a really long head.
Highlighted part yields a really long neck/head.

I thought about using this fish base with massive diagonal strip graft:
It works, but just barely. The head has no detail. At least I want upper/lower beak distinction and eyes. Another issue is the back part got too thick.
The next idea was to put half bird base and fish base on two opposite corners, and somehow fuse them. The half bird base provides 3 long flaps for the head and legs, plus a short flap for the body. The fish base acts like bridge between 2 legs. The remaining paper can be filled with flaps for toes. A straightforward implementation would be as following. However the toes aren't long enough.
Good thing about this structure is we can adjust the proportion easily. By making the fish base smaller, the leg length will be reduced to make toes longer. I picked 1/2 as the reference point. The toes actually look better if all 3 front toes are longer than the one facing backward.
I made few more test fold with 30 cm paper to polish the design, particularly the head area. There was also desire to minimize color leak on the leg areas. When folded with duo colored paper, bird model's legs often have the opposite color exposed.
White color leaks through the leg.

Since this bird's legs are its main feature, we have to prevent color leak. It can be done by ensuring all raw edges in the toes are facing downward, and all raw edges located between toes and thighs are hidden inside. All of this are achieved using "neck twist"-like maneuver. Check the crease pattern on top of this page.
No more color leak.

Fold

The leg part gets quite thick so using kami won't be a good idea. So I used a scrap of black unryu, about 30 cm in size. Not a good choice, it was too thin.

Since it is black on both sides, the exercise to eliminate color leak wasn't fruitful, though still not pointless.

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