Whenever I see one of our hens flapping her wings, as Nellie did yesterday morning after her breakfast, I'm reminded why chickens don't fly very well. The ratio of wing length to body size is way off, as if the creature's designer had sadistic tendencies.
To put it another way: short wings + large hen = poor aerodynamics. Speaking from experience, a hen's wings seem long and powerful if you pick her up incorrectly and she feverishly flaps them in your face. But if you look at a chicken's wings in relationship to the hen as a whole, they are, well, kind of stubby.
Chickens are not flightless birds. They can become airborne. When Liz and I drove down to York County, Maine, in April 2012 to buy our first chickens at a small farm, I saw a free-range hen take off and fly into a tree, where it landed on a branch that was at least 10 to 12 feet off the ground. Some chicken owners even trim their birds' feathers to keep them grounded. (That's something I would never do, even though full-length replacement feathers supposedly grow in when the chicken molts. It strikes me as cruel.)
Still, effortless flight is not really part of a chicken's skill set, to use a tiresome term. As author Gail Damerow notes in The Chicken Encyclopedia: An Illustrated Reference, wings enable a chicken "to fly short distances," but they are more commonly used "for balance during such activities as running or jumping down from a roost."
I've seen our "girls" use their wings in just such a fashion. If one of them stumbles on something, such as a wobbly ramp leading from the coop to the pen, she will extend and possibly flap her wings to right herself, in much the same way that people use their arms to avoid falling on ice. But on those rare occasions when we've had to chase our hens around the yard to get them back into the coop or pen, they've never even tried to fly off, opting instead to run and weave and dart this way and that, without ever leaving the ground.
Which is just as well. Chickens can run pretty darn fast, and they have great evasive moves. They're hard enough to catch as it is. Fortunately for us, they cannot fly with the grace of an eagle or the agility of a hawk or the efficiency of a carrier pigeon or the speed of a hummingbird. The best they can do is to take wing like a bird that never quite got the hang of the thing.
