By Robert Sanders, University of California, Berkeley
How did the earliest birds take wing? Did they fall from trees and learn to flap their forelimbs to avoid crashing? Or did they run along the ground and pump their “arms” to get aloft?
The answer is buried 150 million years in the past, but a new study provides a new piece of evidence–birds have an innate ability to maneuver in midair, a talent that could have helped their ancestors learn to fly rather than fall from a perch.
The study looked at how baby birds, in this case chukar partridges, pheasant-like game birds from Eurasia, react when they fall upside down.
A nine day-old chukar chick righting itself using asymmetric wing flapping and rolling after being dropped upside down. (Photo by Dennis Evangelista).
The researchers, Dennis Evangelista, now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Robert Dudley, University of California, Berkeley professor of integrative biology, found that even ungainly, day-old baby birds successfully use their flapping wings to right themselves when they fall from a nest, a skill that improves with age until they become coordinated and graceful flyers.
“From day one, post-hatching, 25 percent of these birds can basically roll in midair and land on their feet when you drop them,” said Dudley, who also is affiliated with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. “This suggests that even rudimentary wings can serve a very useful aerodynamic purpose.”
The nestlings right themselves by pumping their wings asymmetrically to flip or roll. By nine days after hatching, 100 percent of the birds in the study had developed coordinated or symmetric flapping, plus body pitch control to right themselves.
Chukar partridge chick 1-2 days after hatching. (Photo by Tony Huynh)
“These abilities develop very quickly after hatching, and occur before other previously described uses of the wings, such as for weight support during wing-assisted incline running,” said Evangelista, who emphasized that no chukar chicks were injured in the process. “The results highlight the importance of maneuvering and control in development and evolution of flight in birds.”
The researchers’ study appeared Aug. 27 in the online journal Biology Letters, published by the Royal Society.
Dudley has argued for a decade that midair maneuverability preceded the development of flapping flight and allowed the ancestors of today’s birds to effectively use their forelimbs as rudimentary wings. The new study shows that aerial righting using uncoordinated, asymmetric wing flapping is a very early development.
Righting behavior probably evolved because “nobody wants to be upside down, and it’s particularly dangerous if you’re falling in midair,” Dudley said. “But once animals without wings have this innate aerial righting behavior, when wings came along it became easier, quicker and more efficient.”
Dudley noted that some scientists hypothesize that true powered flight originated in the theropod dinosaurs, the ancestors to birds, when they used symmetric wing flapping while running up an incline, a behavior known as wing-assisted incline running, or WAIR. WAIR proponents argue that the wings assist running by providing lift, like the spoiler on a race car, and that the ability to steer or maneuver is absent early in evolution.
