1What It Means to Be a Flier"All animals are equal," the ruling pigs declared in George Orwell's Animal Farm. "But," they added, "some animals are more equal than others."
All animals are equal no doubt in the eyes of God, and all that manage to survive at all in this difficult world are in some sense "equal." But some, by all objective measures, are far more impressive than others; and none, not even the mammals, the group to which we ourselves belong, quite match up to the birds. Birds have their shortcomings, to be sure, as flesh and blood must. But they are, nonetheless, a very superior form of life.
Above all, birds fly.
They are not the only animals that have taken to the air, of course. There are many gliders. Flying fish are remarkably adept, and various frogs and snakes and lizards contrive to parachute from tree to tree; and there is a variety of gliding mammals, including phalangers and squirrels and colugos (sometimes known as flying lemurs). But only four groups have managed powered flight, driving themselves through the air by flapping or whirring their wings. Many insects fly wonderfully. Bats fly well enough to catch insects in the air—and, for good measure, they do it at night. The ancient pterosaurs, contemporaries of the dinosaurs, included some of the biggest powered fliers of all time—and what a sight they must have been! Pelicans, returning home against the evening sun, might give us some idea of what they were like.
But none of these creatures flies as well as the birds. Perhaps this is why birds are still with us and pterosaurs are not. Perhaps this is why bats fly mainly at night; if they are ever forced to fly by day, as they may do in cold weather when there are too few nighttime insects, they quickly get picked off by hawks.
Flight, indeed, is the key to birds. Many have abandoned flight, of course, like penguins and Ostriches, and there are or have been flightless ducks and geese, many flightless rails and auks, at least one flightless ibis, flightless cormorants, and flightless parrots. The famous Dodo was a flightless pigeon, and there was even one flightless passerine (a perching bird)—or so it's said, though it is hard to tell, since the bird is extinct. But all of these flightless types had flying ancestors. Some birds fly but ineptly—including the superficially grouse-like tinamous of South America, which hurtle along with huge bravado but little control, and sometimes end up killing themselves, like twelve-year-old joyriders. On the whole, sensibly, tinamous prefer to stay on the ground.
The fact that birds fly—or at least are descended from ancestors that were adapted to flight—dominates all aspects of their lives. Flight brings huge and obvious advantages, but it is also immensely demanding and so has its downside, too.
What It Means To Be a Flying MachineAs a mammal, I have often admired and envied birds—as who has not?
I remember once, in southern Spain, struggling over the rocks to get to the base of some cliff to catch a glimpse of the Egyptian Vultures that in the evening appear over the edge, riding along the length of it on the up-currents--not for any obvious reason, since it is too late to feed at that time of day but just, it seems, to keep an eye on things, like the squire riding his estate.
After half an hour or so the vultures did turn up. Birds in general have big eyes—their skulls are built around the orbits—and in birds of prey they are particularly big. The eyes of a big eagle are as big as a human's. In birds of prey (and in some other birds such as kingfishers and swallows), the retina has two foveas (particularly sensitive spots), and the eyes as a whole have a greater concentration of light-gathering, color-sensitive cones than any other vertebrate. So the visual acuity of a hawk or a vulture is two or three times as great as ours. Australia's huge Wedge-tailed Eagle has been shown to see rabbits clearly from a kilometer and a half away. So I daresay that those Egyptian Vultures could see me and my companions more clearly with their unaided eyes than we could see them with all the technology of Zeiss lenses; and it took them less time and almost zero effort to fly the 6 miles or so that they had doubtless traveled than it had taken us to struggle a few hundred yards from the road. As a heavyweight mammal land-bound and land-locked by gravity, I felt inferior. All animals may be equal according to the ideology—but here, truly, birds were the masters.
Yet evolution has not worked entirely in the birds' favor. They pay a price for their magnificence and their skill; and they seem to pay an even higher price than seems strictly necessary. Even the birds that no longer fly—even the ones that have all but abandoned wings altogether, like the kiwi—deep down are built for flight. In general this means they have to be small. If you double the linear dimensions of a bird—or, indeed, of anything: a guinea pig, a brick, a ship—yet retain the same proportions, then you will increase its weight by eight times.
A bird with a body that's 20 centimeters (71/2 inches) long, like a fairly average thrush, weighs eight times as much as one of 10 centimeters (4 inches), like a small finch or weaver. A 40-centimeter (16-inch) bird like a grouse is eight times heavier again—sixty-four times heavier than the finch, or six football teams' worth of people compared to a single person. Whether or not a bird can fly depends on its wing "loading"—the mass that needs to be lifted per unit area of wing. But the area of a wing increases only four times as the body length is doubled, if the overall proportions remain the same. So a thrush that needs to fly as well as a finch needs wings that are twice as big, relative to its body size, as the finch's—and so on and so on: the bigger the bird, the bigger the wing needs to be, not only in absolute terms but also relative to the body size.
The physics of flight is well understood—or so the textbooks suggest. My own sympathies lie with an airline pilot I once met who regularly took 747s across the Atlantic but told me that he still did not quite believe that such egregious structures could really fly at all, since they are big as a row of small houses and many times heavier than air, and stuffed with people and suitcases for good measure. He did his job and drew his salary in a haze of incredulity.
The point of the scientific theory, though, is that air is not so insubstantial as it seems. A wind of 30 miles an hour is difficult to walk against. A hurricane of 100 miles an hour can flatten entire cities, can pick up roofs and even motor cars and hurl them halfway across a state, as so many people have experienced. The energy thus implied is tremendous. Creatures or machines that can harness this energy can fly.
Copyright © 2009 by Colin Tudge. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
