What types of birds alive today are veering towards flightlessness?
Most domesticated fowl, I’d guess. Heirloom chicken breeds are very clumsy flyers, but they can still get up into the branches of a tree*. Many factory-farmed chickens, especially those raised for their meat, wouldn’t have a hope of even doing that.
*Or fly across my mom’s living room, when the box in which they’re being carried down the stairs falls apart with them in it.
There is the Steamer Duck. Three of the four species are flightless and the fourth is close to flightless (they can fly but generally don’t and some bigger ones cannot fly at all).
Mute swans do fly, but not often and not very far.
Interesting!
It now occurs to me that, with the ubiquity of humans and their usual “introduced species” like cats, dogs, and (inadvertently) rats, there won’t be much opportunity for any birds to develop into flightless forms like the dodo. They or their eggs would get gobbled up! This situation would have to take place on an uninhabited island, and there sure ain’t many of them around, anymore.
“*Or fly across my mom’s living room, when the box in which they’re being carried down the stairs falls apart with them in it.”
Wish I could have seen that! In your house though, not mine.
It is believed that perhaps more than 1000 species of flightless rail became extinct on Pacific islands after the arrival of Polynesians, rats, and pigs.
Although some flightless birds, especially large ones like ostriches and their relatives, can survive in areas with mammalian predators, flightlessness is most likely to evolve on islands where there are few or no terrestrial predators. Since humans have introduced rats on even the most remote islands, there are few remaining places on Earth where flightlessness is now likely to evolve.
“So help me God I thought turkeys could fly!..”
Of course, there probably aren’t very many (near) flightless birds outside the tropics. It’s a long walk to Mexico every winter.
Ha! Modern turkeys have been bred for such large proportions of breast meat (the most desirable part for eating) that they can barely walk, much less fly.
Lies!
Just to be clear, though, any species or population of birds that might seem to be poor flyers could easily end up becoming good flyers again depending on the environmental conditions it encounters. You can’t really say that any population or species is “veering” in any direction. Evolution doesn’t work that way.
Coots don’t seem to be able to fly anywhere. They just beat their wings like crazy and tip-toe through the water. But they’re everywhere. They aren’t walking across the freeway to get to the next lake. But I have truly never seen one actually fly.
They’re not very graceful, but they can in fact fly.
The albatross, or “Goonie” is just about almost too heavy and big to fly. It can fly, but takeoff requires perfect wind conditions, if the wind shifts slightly, the bird has two options: abort takeoff, possibly catastrophically, or attempt takeoff, and fail, possibly catastrophically, or become slightly airborne, and then crash. Landings are similarly, not particularly elegant. Once its caught a thermal updraft, its huge wingspan makes it a beautiful soaring machine. Because its a large bird with huge wingspan, it has a very strong keel-bone, so crashes aren’t as bad as they look. Do the youtube search on your own, there’s gotta be vids.
Kinda ticks me of how it got the name “Goonie” – “oh, Hurr, hurr, bird can’t fly”
Hey, its the largest, heaviest bird that can still fly, its doing the best it can, with what its got, and its designed to take a crash. There oughta be a human analogy, like, an Olympic marathon runner who twists their ankle and the announcer says, “Seriously, useless people should stay home and not clog up our Olympics. What? What’d I say?”
Well, as you note it can fly spectacularly well - though it does indeed struggle a bit to take off and to land. Its high wingloading is the cause of this, and also the reason it flies unusually fast. It’s certainly not a candidate for the “veering toward flightlessness” category.
Albatrosses spend most of their time over the ocean, where thermals are not especially common. Their mainstays are using the interaction of wind with waves, anddynamic soaring: using dives and pullups to extract energy from differences in horizontal air motion.
How about old coots? I’ve noticed they can barely walk sometimes.
I’ve personally seen flights of several miles without difficulty aside from their lumbering take offs. The relatively large lake where my grandparents retired had a pair nesting on it’s largest “bowl” that was about 3.5 miles across and longer than that. They pretty much claimed the whole thing as theirs. Flights were rare for a good chunk of the year with a pretty good reason. The young are flightless for over 4 months. Add in incubation time where they didn’t stray far from the nest and about half the year is tied to protecting the flightless. Most of the flights I saw during that period were very short. Just long enough to put the fear of angry swan into the Canadian Geese. When not dealing with the young, though, that pair seemed perfectly willing to fly around their territory.
“Hey honey, now that the kids have moved out do, you want to go out to dinner? I thought we could fly down to that nice feeding spot at the other end of the lake that we haven’t visited in ages.”
I’d argue roadrunners since they can fly, but don’t very much. I’ve mostly just seen them use their wings to get up and down heights–walls, trees, etc. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one fly more than maybe ten feet.