The currently-posted Staff Report gives a brief explanation for why chickens can’t fly. There’s just one problem: They can. I, personally, have witnessed an angry chicken flying across my mother’s living room. Now, they’re not very good flyers, and can’t fly very fast or far, but they can do it. And even their wild ancestors were never all that great at it, needing it only to reach the limbs of the nearest tree.
This was a laying breed. It’s possible that meat breeds have so much added weight that they can’t fly any more, but then again, most of that added weight is in the flight muscles in the breast, so I wouldn’t be surprised if meat breeds could do it, too.
“[The chicken] had wings, it had feathers; I’m from Detroit, how was I supposed to know chickens can’t fly. I tossed into the air and it just plunged into the audience” — Alice Cooper explaining how a certain myth came about.
Another vote for having seen chickens fly! Nobody put them in the trees or on the fence posts; they just do it. It’s a horrible, panicky sort of flying, but it’s flying.
YouTube has everything, including video of chickens flying (unless, perhaps, those are overfed ducks in disguise).
Judging from eyewitness reports, I was expecting to see them flying upside down or in unintentional spiral trajectories, but they seem to fly at least as well as many of us swim:
For about a year when I was a teenager, we had chickens. We started out clipping their wings and the darned things would still fly over the 4-foot fence and get eaten by our dog.
Of course chickens get angry … chickens in Mother’s living room, not so often … angry chicken flying across Mother’s living room … I think we’re all getting a whippin’
And that’s what really matters. They always laugh at the first short, slow flights, at the wobbly tenuousness of great beginnings. But mark my words, they won’t be laughing when the first chicken flies solo from New York to Paris.
There wouldn’t be 676,000 hits for “clip chicken wings” and 33,300 hits for “clip chicken wings to prevent flying” if chickens couldn’t fly. You wanna see flying chickens in situ? The Cayman Islands are lousy with them!