Flightless Birds.
"And first, I praise the nobler traits
Of birds preceding Noah,
The giant clan, whose meat was Man,
Dinornis, Apteryx, Moa."—Courthope.
The steamer duck—The owl parrot—the flightless grebe of Titicaca—The dodo and solitaire—The ostrich tribe—The penguin’s wings.
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The poet who penned the above lines thought more of rhymes than of reasons—as Poets so often do. What were their "nobler traits"? He omits to mention them. None of them were ever carnivorous: and the Apteryx could by no stretch of the imagination be called a “giant.” The one outstanding feature which does distinguish these birds he fails entirely to appreciate—and this is their flightless condition.
A flightless bird is an anomaly. Yet there are some who profess to believe that this state affords us an insight into the early stages of the Evolution of the wing. As a matter of fact it demonstrates the exact opposite—its degeneration.
How is it that birds ever came to such a pass? A study of living flightless birds, and birds that are well on the way to this condition, will afford us a ready answer.