Silquill

It forages the leaf-litter for seeds and slow beetles, scratching and jabbing with a beak better suited to digging than song. Danger triggers not flight but freeze: it drops flat, quills raised, and becomes indistinguishable from a clump of dead bracken, a trick it will hold with astonishing nerve. When cornered it fires a loose quill or two, more distraction than weapon, and uses the flinch to bolt. It roosts in dense thorn where its own spininess is redundant, which seems to be the point.