Parrots are built for flight.

Before we can explore the physical and psychological effects of clipping wings, we must first discuss some basics of natural history and biology.  The purpose of this discussion is to debunk the myths which claim parrots don’t need to fly, don’t want to fly, don’t like to fly, or are bad at flying.  These myths have been reinforced within our culture because clipping wings is so common.  When people see parrots sitting on perches, never flying, it promotes the incorrect assumption that “parrots don’t really fly”.  Even more damaging to a proper understanding of the role flight plays for a parrot is when someone sees a parrot attempt to fly and it falls or crashes instead.  The people witnessing these things for the first time often don’t know much about parrots; it doesn’t cross their minds that those birds might be clipped, or that they might have been clipped before learning to fly.  Then, if they or someone they know comes to own a bird later on, the idea of clipping wings seems harmless enough (since they think that parrots aren’t very good flyers anyway), and the cycle continues.  But this is a cycle we can break if people are given the correct information.

Parrots are neither sedentary nor clumsy flyers by nature.  Credit: @flying_orion on Instagram.

Birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs about 160 million years ago, during the Jurassic period, and are part of the same group which includes well-known dinosaurs like the T-rex and velociraptor, though birds are not direct descendants of either.¹  In fact, birds had already taken on some very familiar shapes even before non-avian dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago.²  Rest assured, birds have been flying for much, much longer than we have been keeping them as pets.

These “ducks” are actually an artist’s depiction of Vegavis iaai, which lived about 68-66 million years ago. Illustration from National Geographic.²⁰

Because flight is such a highly specialised activity, birds have evolved numerous adaptations in order to make it possible.  To put it simply, Mother Nature has engineered their bodies for flight.³  A flighted bird’s skeleton, like an aircraft frame, is as light as possible while remaining as strong as possible.  It is neither heavy nor fragile.  In fact, a flighted bird’s bones are denser than those of a flightless mammal of the same size.⁴  Strong and stiff compared to their weight, most bird bones are filled with air and reinforcing struts.  (Source: see footnote 3.)  The length of their wing bones scales more steeply with weight than the length of their leg bones because their wings are meant to support a heavier load.⁵  Many of their bones are fused together for stability and reduced in some way to decrease weight.  (Source: see footnote 3.)  Flighted bird species even have a special extension of their breastbone, called the keel, which serves as an anchor point for their extremely developed and powerful flight muscles. (Source: see footnote 3.)  The larger pectoralis major pushes the wing down, while the smaller supracoracoideus pulls it up.⁶  These muscles alone account for 25-35% of total body mass in an average flying bird.⁷  In humans, all of our muscle combined accounts for 30-40% of our total body mass.⁸  To say that a volant bird’s flight muscles are important would be an understatement.  Flightless birds like the ostrich and the emu, on the other hand, have comparatively larger and more powerful leg muscles.⁹

Don’t blink or you’ll miss her! This black-capped lory has been professionally trained to fly outdoors and return (DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME), but she lives in captivity as a companion bird. She gets everything she needs from humans yet flies with this level of enthusiasm everyday. She asks that you please ignore myths you may hear about parrots not enjoying or needing flight. Credit: lory_adventures on Instagram.

A bird’s heart is typically twice as heavy as a mammal’s of the same size and is capable of pumping more blood with each beat in order to supply the body with enough oxygen during flight.¹⁰  Likewise, a bird’s respiratory system is optimized to meet the oxygen demands of flight.  It includes not just lungs, but a series of air sacs.  (Source: see footnote 3.)  These air sacs increase air intake and allow for the uninterrupted flow of oxygen in and carbon dioxide out.  The feathers of flightless dinosaurs probably served display and thermoregulation purposes, but in modern, flighted birds, they also provide key aerodynamic functions, like generating thrust and lift.  (Source: see footnote 3.)  You may have heard about birds’ exceptional intelligence and ultra-keen vision.  Both of these traits are due, at least in part, to the development of flight.¹¹  Their brains had to become more sophisticated in order for them to fly successfully; you can’t move through the air at high speeds without crashing into something unless your eyes and brain can keep up with the incoming visual data.  Other adaptations for flight include having a beak (instead of teeth) and a greatly reduced urogenital system, both of which do away with unnecessary weight.  (Source: see footnote 3.)

This image, from a research paper on how certain bone-related genes may have contributed to the origin of flight²¹, highlights some of the skeletal adaptations birds possess which make flight possible.

If you didn’t before, you now understand that a bird’s body is specifically adapted for flight.  But there are flightless birds, aren’t there?  Yes, there are bird species which have evolved to be flightless.  The ostrich and the emu are flightless.  The Galápagos cormorant and the kiwi are flightless.  Flamingos, for example, are not flightless.  They are in fact very strong flyers capable of travelling several hundred miles without stopping, often in a single night.¹²  These birds migrate to reach breeding grounds and fly from wetland to wetland in order to forage.¹³  So, if you see them in an outdoor enclosure with no walls or roof and find yourself wondering why they don’t fly away, it’s because they’re either pinioned (a surgical amputation of part of the wing) or their wings are clipped.¹⁴  One justification for the pinioning of zoo birds is “giving visitors the impression that the birds are ‘free'” when in reality they have been permanently disabled through amputation.¹⁵  Thus, we can be conditioned to see any bird as flightless–even ones that clearly fly a great deal in the wild.  If you’ve ever been to a pet store and seen a parrot who sits out in the open and never flies, you may have thought that this is because parrots don’t fly very much or don’t like to fly.  But parrots, like flamingos, are natural-born flyers; it is very rare for a captive parrot to be entirely flightless for reasons other than clipped wings or confinement.

Pinioning, the means by which many captive flamingo populations are rendered flightless, is surgical amputation. Procedures such as pinioning and the clipping of wings change public perception of how birds function in the wild.  Images from Current Therapy in Avian Medicine and Surgery.²²

These flamingos (found at a large and popular AZA-accredited zoo in the U.S.) cannot fly because they have each had one of their wings cut in half. The amputation is deliberately performed on only one wing so that they will be imbalanced, making all flight completely impossible.

Did you know that swimming pools are a required component of penguin enclosures even though penguins studied across multiple zoos only used their pools between 2 and 23% of the time?¹⁶, ¹⁷  Swimming is considered a basic need in penguins and is used as an indicator for physical activity and natural behaviour.  (Source: see footnote 17.)  Penguins may be flightless in the literal sense, but not in the biomechanical sense.  For the purposes of a study on avian locomotion and bone structure, penguins were not grouped with other flightless birds.  They were placed in their own group because their wings serve as lift-generating hydrofoils and allow for a type of “aquatic flight”.¹⁸  Therefore, a penguin’s version of flight is deemed indispensable, with zoos seeking to encourage it for the betterment of penguin welfare, even while preventing parrots from flying remains standard among many aviculturists and bird owners.  “Folklore husbandry”, a term gaining traction in the world of herpetology, refers to methods of keeping animals in captivity that are implicitly accepted and followed out of tradition.¹⁹  It would seem that parrots are long-suffering victims of folklore husbandry; they are consistently denied flight, their natural locomotion, because of old wives’ tales, e.g. “birds can’t avoid windows” or “flighted birds are more aggressive”.