Flapping Baby Birds Reveal Origin of Flight

Flapping baby birds, it turns out, have the innate ability to maneuver in midair, shedding light on the origin of flight, according to a new study.

The study looked at how baby birds, in this case chukar partridges, pheasant-like game birds from Eurasia, react when they fall upside down. Researchers note that no chukar chicks were injured in the process.

"From day one, post-hatching, 25 percent of these birds can basically roll in midair and land on their feet when you drop them," Robert Dudley, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, explained in a university news release. "This suggests that even rudimentary wings can serve a very useful aerodynamic purpose."

These baby birds, even at just one day old, successfully flapped their little wings to right themselves when they fell from a nest - a skill that improves with age and likely helped their ancestors learn to fly rather than fall from a perch.

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.

"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," explained Dennis Evangelista of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. "The results highlight the importance of maneuvering and control in development and evolution of flight in birds."

Some scientists theorize that true powered flight originated in the theropod dinosaurs - the ancestors to birds - when they used symmetric wing flapping while running up an incline.

But Dudley believes flight developed in tree-dwelling animals that fell and eventually evolved the ability to glide and fly. Lots of animals other than birds use parts of their body to prevent hard landings on the ground, such as lizards, lemurs and ants.

"This experiment illustrates that there is a much broader range of aerodynamic capacity available for animals with these tiny, tiny wings than has been previously realized," Dudley said.

The findings were published in the journal Biology Letters.