Here is one!
I can’t find the link to the original nerds any more, but googling ‘chicken steadicam’ now throws up a whole list of imitators. The bad news is that it’s primarily visually driven so unlikely to work in an AI. You might be able to come up with a chicken-driven autopilot though.
Here is another… these east Europeans have funny ways to spend their time 
primarily visually driven
The question I have is what were these bids looking at? Food or a female?
There’s a video on it showing some visual input, though watching it again in more detail I admit it’s not very impressive:
Anybody got any chickens they could blindfold?
While interesting this doesn’t prove they could be used as “attitude indictators”. Try the same under g-forces in a turn and add vibration and the results might be different!
The human ocular stabilisation mechanism works poorly in flight (the leans, etc) so while I would expect animals (especially predators who need good eyesight, like the owl) to be much better, and clearly they are, it is probably not good enough.
And then you have to feed the thing and clean up the crap
The biggest problem is the lack of a non-visual erection mechanism. The error would quickly accumulate and make it useless.
I’ve often wondered whether birds can fly in IMC and whether they have a better way of sensing altitude changes than we do.
For some reason that I don’t now recall, I used to think they must be able to sense altitude changes. Or wondered whether how they equalised pressure within their hollow bones.
I vaguely remember a hilarious text about an experiment in WW2, perhaps the Battle of the Bulge, where planes were grounded for days upon days due to low cloud/fog/mist. Then someone observed the ducks were still flying, and would flap their wings vigourously just before touching down. A device was concocted to hold a duck – which takes something, these birds have muscle and a lot of it – secured to a plane, with its head outside, and the pilot was supposed to flare when the duck flapped its wings.
I tried to find it on the www but no luck so far.
Sounds more like WW1 to me. In WW2 they had gyroscopes and autopilots, even in missiles.
