ani

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. Any of several chiefly tropical American birds of the genus Crotophaga, related to the cuckoo and having black plumage and a long tail.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. A bird of the genus Crotophaga, sub-family Crotophaginæ, and family Cuculidæ, inhabiting the warmer parts of America. There are several species, two of them inhabiting the United States. The black ani, Crotophaga ani, is about a foot long, entirely black, with violet, steel-blue, and bronze reflections; the iris is brown; the feathers of the head and neck are lanceolate; the crest of the bill is smooth or with few wrinkles; and the culmen is regularly curved. It is called in the West Indies the black witch and savanna blackbird, and is known to the French of Cayenne as boutde-setun. It occurs from Florida southward. Another species, C. sulcirostris, the groove-billed ani, is found in tropical America and northward to Texas. Its bill has three distinct grooves, parallel with the curved culmen. All are gregarious in habit, and nest in bushes, several individuals sometimes using one large nest in common; they lay plain greenish eggs, covered with a white chalky substance. See Crotophaga.

Wiktionary

1. n. A bird of the genus Crotophaga in the cuckoo family.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. (Zoöl.) A black bird of tropical America, the West Indies and Florida (Crotophaga ani), allied to the cuckoos, having a compressed, bladelike bill and remarkable for communistic nesting.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. black tropical American cuckoo