In my last essay on Hawaiian seabirds, I did not include our brief encounter with its s

Flightless Fancy

In my last essay on Hawaiian seabirds, I did not mention our brief encounter with its state bird, the Nene goose. That’s because it – a goose who closely resembles our Canada goose or the brant I used to see in the coastal salt marshes of New Jersey – no longer goes to sea and is almost flightless. A small flock of them waddled along the pavement of a narrow side road in Kilauea National Wildlife Refuge, close to dense cover on both sides. It is thought that they are descended from an errant number of flying geese who were blown by the vagaries of wind and, by a stroke of luck, drifted over these tiny fists of lava rising from the Pacific swells. They do have the ability to fly short distances, but they cannot sustain prolonged flight. As we watched them, they melted into the brush, disappearing completely.

All of this set me to wondering about flightless birds – an odd notion in itself - and how so many of their ilk are extinct or teetering on the brink, how the percentage is, for obvious reasons, exceedingly high on islands or ecologically fragmented parcels of land. And, I wondered, too, about why on the North American continent – no insignificant land mass – we had no extant (that is, living) native flightless birds. South America has its rhea, Africa, its ostrich, and Australia, its emu. So, where is our Big Bird?

Well, we HAD a few – Diatryma, a giant from the *Eocene, and Gastornis, a two meter tall, big-headed thing whose fossil has been found in Wyoming. But none running around with the “sons of the **Pleistocene,” or with the huge herds of bison that migrated over the plains in the last 12,000 years. Other continents and smaller landmasses had theirs, too: the Phorurhacos longissimus, a scary predator from Brazil and Patagonia; the adzebills, moa-sized birds related to swans, of New Zealand; and Bullockornis, the Demon Duck of Doom, from Australia, who was eight feet and shear-billed, a giant goose or duck (hence its cool, but frightening, nickname). None of these met their demise at the hand of man (we hadn’t evolved yet), but if they were this big and bad – few were herbivores, it seems – good riddance. Still, I’d like to know what happened to them, wouldn’t you?

But there are others whom I would like to have known. The mancalla, an auk (like today’s murres), whose fate remains a mystery, lived in California and Mexico until the end of the Pleistocene. But we know full well what has happened to others. The great auk, a penguin-like seabird, lived around the northern arc of the Atlantic, but because it was tasty, rich in oil and laid nutrient-laden eggs, it was plundered, the last pair bopped on the head by a “harvester” in 1844. (Some say in 1850 a single individual was seen swimming in the North Atlantic.) The Pallas’ or Steller’s spectacled cormorant from the North Pacific was hunted to oblivion by the Aleuts. Perhaps the most heart-rending loss was that of the Stephens Island (New Zealand) wren, the only species we know of that was wiped out by one individual – the lighthouse keeper’s cat, Tibbles. (There are fewer than five flightless passerines: I was surprised to find out that there were ANY!)

It would be great fun to be out and about, just birding along, when suddenly there it was – the elusive flightless Flint Hills sparrow! But I’m so bad at identifying sparrows, I probably wouldn’t know it if I saw it.

*Eocene - - began around 48 million years ago and ended 34 million yrs ago

**Pleistocene – 1.81 million years ago to 11,500 yrs. ago