Converting String To Animal?

In my Java class, the last assignment we had to turn in was to create a program that would take a users input and create a new type of animal. I went through the different steps in the instructions, and everything seemed to be going well up until the point where we actually took the users input and created the new animal. Specifically, I kept getting an error stating that I could convert a String to an animal.

I'm attaching the main class (Animal), one of my animal classes (Bird) and the class where I'm getting the error (AnimalStuff). I turned the program in as is, so what's done is done, but I'd like to learn what I'm doing wrong and what I can do better. I do know that the loop in AnimalStuff is wrong as it doesn't work right either, but I'm more concerned about the conversion from String to animal, as the entire program depended on this to work, and it doesn't.

public class Animal {
/**
* @param args the command line arguments
*/
public static void main(String[] args) {
}
public static String kind;
public static String integument;

[code]....

Is there anything that jumps out at to what I'm doing absolutely wrong?