Ducky's wings/feathers have grown quite a bit. She's trying out the notion of flying with them ...
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Friday, August 14, 2009
Ok, It's a Week Later
Ducky's wings/feathers have grown quite a bit. She's trying out the notion of flying with them ...share on: facebook
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I have this theory about baby birds. I think that the physics of bird flight (and insect flight) does not scale well with body size, so young birds are necessarily unable to fly until they grow to adult proportions. Walking on land and swimming do scale well, so aquatic birds and land-bound birds can have precocial young (young that are physically active and mobile), but birds that depend on flight are forced to have altricial (helpless) young that remain in the nest until reaching adult size finally enables them to fly.
Or maybe the other way 'round ... baby birds in the nest are arguably less suseptible to predation, so they can hang around helplessly longer ...
Anyway, it's startling to look at the Aug 4 pic of mother & ducky - they're almost identical except that duckie's wings (folded against her body)are half the length.
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