Birds Can 39;t Fly

[Antígona Knknown]

Butwhat were they doing in London in January? During the winter, they usually live in the middle of India, and in the summer they live in Kazakhstan or Mongolia. If you look at a map of the Earth, you can see the barrier between Kazakhstan and India is the Himalayan Mountain Range, the tallest in the world. Every year, millions of bar-headed geese migrate over the Himalayas and have been doing so for millions of years. They have been seen flying at 28,000 feet. They have flown over Mount Everest! How do they do that?

How did birds get such great lungs? They inherited them from dinosaurs. Birds are dinosaurs! When I was growing up in the 1940s, there was a category in biology called Aves, which meant birds. But scientists have now folded Aves into a category called Dinosauria, and those dinosauria, like pigeons and seagulls and geese, are flying all around us today. If you want to know what a dinosaur probably tasted like, eat some chicken!

So, dinosaurs had this super-efficient lung system, and they successfully strode the Earth as the dominant species, starting around 250 million years ago to about 65 million years ago, when a huge asteroid crashed into Mexico and most of them went extinct. Except for birds. But why did dinosaurs have this super lung system in the first place?

To answer that, we have to go way back, to when plants came out of the ocean onto land, about 450 million years ago. Earlier than that, plant life lived only in the ocean: The surface of the Earth was a desert.

So for many tens of millions of years, plants on land had to be happy sticking like moss to the surfaces of rocks. But they clearly resented this, and decided to form a committee to request an exemption from Mr. R&D.

PC: We want to do what we did in the ocean, which is absorb lots of sunlight, and the best way to do that is to have a long stalk, and then to have branches with leaves at the end of the branches and maximize our potential to absorb sunlight.

Eventually another tree would die and fall on top of the first, and then the same thing would happen again, and another and another, and it kept going like this for hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions of years. In the end, over 100 million years of dead trees and ferns and undigested lignin were deposited under the surface of the Earth. We call the time when most of this happened the Carboniferous (carbon-making) age.

But thanks to this Isaac Newton of a mushroom spore, they realized what they had to do. They had to give off a special chemical enzyme that dissolves the lignin and breaks it up into smaller pieces externally. And so they invented dry rot.

The decay process pulls oxygen out of the atmosphere and binds it to the hydrocarbons, releasing carbon dioxide (CO2) and water (H2O) as a result. This is what happens when wood burns (very rapid oxidation), when we digest food (moderate oxidation), and when organic material decays (slow oxidation).

And, 5 million years later, which is the time it took to design this very complicated thing, Mr. R&D came up with a lung system with both an entry point and an exit point, with hollow bones and air-sacs to temporarily store oxygenated air. It was super-efficient compared to any previous lung system and made the best use of the limited oxygen. The animals that received this gift from Mr. R&D were the dinosaurs.

What can we do now about this problem? First, all of us need to recognize this really is a problem, and hope to convince people in powerful positions to do something about it. The difficult thing is that most old folks grew up thinking that oil, coal, and gas were great, and it is hard to teach old dogs new tricks. You are young and you can see the situation more clearly than older people can.

There are many good alternatives now to burning fossilized hydrocarbons. Windmills. Solar panels. Tidal power. Even some kinds of safe nuclear power like thorium reactors. Scientists are also working on inventions that can pull excess carbon dioxide right out of the atmosphere and turn it into limestone (to build things with: The Egyptian pyramids are made of limestone) or even turn it into fuel. But these inventions need to be scaled up quickly. They are sort of like where rockets were in the 1920s. But in 40 years men had ridden rockets to the moon!

Young fledglings tend to place all their hope in remaining unseen. Two young American Robins I encountered recently remained motionless even when I stuck a camera lens within inches of them, stoically hoping that I would believe that they were statues and go away.

All of that is a lot for a young bird to handle. But there is one thing that can make it all easier: parental care. Parents feed fledglings and show them where to find food on their own; they warn of and even attack predators, and guide fledglings to safe places. An extra week of parental care can halve the mortality rate for fledglings.

So next time you see a scruffy bird with fuzzy eyebrows and a yellow gape, you can still think it looks silly (they do!), but also think about the challenges it and its parents face. The fledgling period is a complex and fascinating time.

i had to put a fledgling back in the nest to save it-there are so many stray cats here and one was sitting right in front of it -it was using it like a toy and the mother bird was going crazy screaming at the cat but couldnt help the baby -there was so safe place to put it where a cat or my neighbors dog coiuldnt get it since i think the dog already got one-i watched this mother bird take care of these babies and even today with the fledging watched her try to show it how to get up on the fence but the baby kept hopping and ended up by a stray cat-i dont know what to do to save it and feel bad that i dont think any of then will survive.

My question is regarding the time when fledglings first leave the nest. Some finches just hatched outside my bedroom window on the third floor of an apt building. Other than the rail the nest is on, there are no branches or other perching areas and it is a straight drop down to a concrete area. Will the baby birds be able to safely get down from the nest as they transition from nestling to fledgling? Baby birds are awesome, I would love it if they get a fair chance at a birds life.

How far do fledgling robins travel from their original nest? I found an uninjured fledgling on the road in a residential area and there was little to no groubd vegetation, but high tree cover. I had to move the bird approx 75 yards away to find shrubs and trees. Will the parents find it?

I am devastated right now. For the past several days we have had a fledgling (finch?) in our yard and have watched the mom feeding it. A couple of hours ago I watered the yard and must have scared the baby. My husband found it drowned in the pool. The mother has been flying around looking for her baby. I feel so guilty and sad. Just sharing.

I recommend mealworms over worms because some kinds of commonly-sold worms are weirdly toxic to certain species. Also, the mealworms will crawl around in the dish a lot, and the motion should be better able to attract the attention of the robins.

The longer you can keep the dogs away, the better; but the crucial time is the first week out of the nest. After a week, most fledglings should be at least somewhat flighted. (How flighted they need to be depends on how skilled your dogs are at hunting, too.)

If you have a photo of the fledgling and send it to me at klabarbera[at]berkeley.edu, I can try to figure out how old it is, which may affect what you do here. A young fledgling needs its parents much more than an older one.

Thank you so much for your prompt reply. I moved the bird bath closer to the carport and more in the open (cats) and parked the cars on the other side of the driveway (cats) and I have done what I can do for them. They made their first quiet chirping sounds today (they were born about 6 days ago). I will definitely put up a cavity for them in a safer spot. I think I will make a small crude wood box with a cover overhead,and place her old nest in it. Do you think saving the old nest and putting it in a new cavity would help her accept her new home??? I would assume she would know it was hers. Your website is awesome, and you are so very helpful.

Oh, one more question. My friend has a bird house-the kind with the little hole in the front, but I am not sure I could get the birds through it, or if the parents could get through it. Or are they able to squish themselves into smaller spaces than one would think??

Thoroughly enjoyed your article! I had a baby that I have successfully raised to a fledgling Who is still taping for food as I expected it would. Do you have any helpful hints for me teaching it to find its own food when I eventually release it at adulthood?

Note on mealworms: live insects are crucial, as he needs to practice finding, catching, and eating these. Mealworms are NOT worms (despite the name) and worms are not a good idea. Make sure you get mealworms.

Please I need your help. I live on the 15th floor and noticed a dove sitting in a flower pot (in my balcony) all the time. Realized it was laying eggs and yes soon I saw two. Only one baby bird hatched on June 7th or 8th. I have been watching it grow in leaps and bounds and fallen in love with it. It has hopped out of the flower pot and loves moving around and started flying pretty well too. I noticed the father feeding it yesterday.

Unfortunately today my son was a bit too near for comfort and it flew out of the balcony. We are devastated. It flew very well indeed , so that is ok. But it cannot feed itself yet I assume because I saw the father feeding it yesterday. My questions. (a) Will it be able to feed itself?. (b) Will the parents be able to find it (they were in the balcony this morning looking for it) (c) Will it ever come back to its nest?

Your plant must be the perfect nesting place! I think that the robins who are repeatedly nesting there are either the same pair, or (in the second year) offspring of the first pair. Birds will re-use nesting spots that have been successful.

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