Did birds and flight evolve? Or were they created?
Birds can fly ... Why can't I?
If an award were given to the bird with the clumsiest landing, the gooney bird would win. In the sky it is powerful and graceful. It skillfully uses wind currents to glide over the ocean for hours without a flap of its wings. It is called the “gooney bird” because of its clumsy landings.
But if landing is not the strong point of this bird — better known as the albatross (above) — flying certainly is. The albatross may not touch land more than a few times in five years. It sleeps on the surface of the ocean, drinks seawater, and feeds on small marine creatures and garbage thrown from ships.
The albatross is perfectly designed for flight.
Evolution from non-flying reptile?
For a flying bird to have evolved from a non-flying reptile, as the evolution theory proposes, almost every structure in the non-flying animal would need to change. The evidence that this happened is insufficient and certainly disputable.
In search of an answer to why humans can’t fly, some people have compared the bones in a bird’s wing with those in their own arm. There is obvious similarity. Yet there is an important difference: the wing was designed to fly; your arm was not.
Arms don't equal wings!
Even if you could cover your arms with feathers, you still couldn’t fly. Your arm bones may look like those in a bird’s wing, but they can never serve the same flight function. A bird’s bones are virtually hollow, like strands of macaroni or straw. To fly, you would need enormous wings. But how could you flap your wings? Your muscles would tire too easily. Birds have two strong sets of breast muscles — a large set controls the wings’ downstrokes, and a smaller set controls the upstrokes.
Even a bird’s beak is designed to save weight. Unlike the human jaw, which is heavy bone, a bird’s beak is lightweight horn. This too shows perfect planning in the bird's creation.
But let’s suppose you somehow had wings of the right length. You still couldn’t fly like a bird! You don’t have air-filled bags in your body like those that lie between the bird’s heart, lungs, stomach, and other organs. The bird’s air sacs are connected to its lungs, and during flight air flows through them. This rapidly feeds the bird’s body tissues with life-supporting oxygen while keeping it light in the air.
Astonishing flight skills
Just as the albatross has exceptional soaring skills, the hummingbird is the master of maneuverability. The smallest hummingbird is the bee hummingbird, which is not much bigger than a bumblebee. A hummingbird may visit up to 2000 flowers a day to sip the high-energy sugars it needs to fuel its flying abilities. It hovers and beats its wings an incredible 60 to 90 times a second. Such rapid wingbeats create a humming sound, which is how the hummingbird got its name.
News reports on October 22, 2008 told of an amazing flight by a bar-tailed godwit (above) that broke the record established for the world's longest known non-stop bird flight. An electronic tag allowed researchers to track the female godwit as it flew non-stop for 7257 miles (11,679 kilometres) across the Pacific Ocean from western Alaska to New Zealand.
One outstanding feature of birds is their feathers. Feathers insulate the bird from the sun’s heat and protect it from the cold. Feathers prevent birds from getting too wet, and are an important part of their wings. Tail feathers help the bird balance in the air, steer its flight, and act as a brake when it is slowing to land.
You can see there are many reasons why birds can fly and you cannot. Birds have a lightweight skeleton; your body is too heavy. Flying birds have strong muscles to control their flight; your muscles tire too easily. Birds have air sacs, light beaks, small lungs, and wings designed for flying; your body is simply shaped all wrong for flight.
It is clear that there is one overall reason why birds can fly and humans cannot: God created birds to fly from the beginning (Genesis 1:20, 21).
Poachers hypnotize birds
Bird poachers in Vietnam found that birds went into a trance when they heard the Brazilian dance tune the Lambada. The Saigon Times Daily reported that poachers armed with cassette tape players began flocking to bird sanctuaries to hypnotize the birds with the Lambada so they could steal them more easily. “With this sort of hunting,” the newspaper said, “birds in the Mekong Delta are in danger of extinction.”