October 2005     MG News       St. Louis MG

Bird Bath by Connie Alwood

Certainly children thousands of years ago jumped up on a rock or stood on a slope, threw themselves into the air, and flapped their arms as if they were wings. Their descent to earth was as disheartening as it is to today's young. We want to fly. We yearn to be birds. We see a hawk soar or watch a hummingbird zoom off in seemingly four different directions at once and we feel a pang of envy, a sense of inferiority even. Alas! We are earthbound. Of course, we can always take a plane. But every child knows that's not the same.

The irony is that birds don't necessarily want to fly. The hottest movie of this past summer has been about a group of flightless birds--penguins--who apparently gave up their ability to fly and settled for marching and swimming. Lots of other birds have also joined the penguins in their disdain for flying. It turns out that one of the main reasons for flight is not joy, but to escape from predators. Remove the predators and many species are quite content to keep both feet on terra firma. Basically flying requires a good deal of the bird's energy.

Of the forty flightless birds in the world, most reside on islands, especially in New Zealand, which had no mammalian predators until man introduced them and himself about 1,000 years ago. Most of us are familiar with the flightless penguins, kiwis, and ostriches, but there's also a flightless parrot, duck, and even a cormorant. These birds have evolved wing bones that are small; they have flat breast bones instead of the rounded ones that would anchor the strong muscles needed for flight. They also have more feathers overall.

In many cases giving up the ability to fly was a bad decision. Several of New Zealand's flightless birds and those from other islands are extinct or endangered¾none so ignominiously as the Dodo. Not only did our intrusion onto his island, Mauritius, send him into extinction, but we have even blamed him for becoming extinct.

The Dodo, Great Auk, and even those adorable flightless birds in "The March of the Penquins" may have given up the ability to fly, but children everywhere will wonder why.