Hen Chronicles: The remarkable diversity of Aves

As members of the class of animals known as Aves, birds are “warm-blooded vertebrates distinguished by having the body more or less completely covered with feathers and the forelimbs modified as wings,” according to merriam-webster.com.

And there the similarity ends. In many cases, anyway.

There are an estimated 9,000 species of birds worldwide, according to the University of California Museum of Paleontology, so it’s not surprising that they take many forms. Once you look beyond such commonalities as beaks, feathers and egg laying, birds vary dramatically, as any child can tell you. Heck, some of them can’t even do the one thing we most associate with birds: fly.

But let’s put penguins aside for the moment. It only took a trip into my backyard the other day to illustrate, on a small scale, the variations that exist among birds.

As I was walking through the yard, I heard, and then saw, a woodpecker pecking away at our elderberry plant, which is located some distance from the chicken coop. Thanks to where I was standing at the time, I could see the woodpecker in the foreground and our three hens in the background, watching me from the front of their pen to determine whether I was headed their way with snacks.

If I had been armed with a camera, the woodpecker and the hens would have been in the same shot, except that either the woodpecker or the hens would have been at least slightly out of focus, because of the distance that separated them. To my eye, though, both foreground and background were in sharp focus.

That’s what made the contrast between the hens and the woodpecker so telling. When seen in the same visual “frame,” the hens obviously were much larger than the woodpecker. The chickens and the woodpecker did not share the same coloring or shape or behavior or general characteristics. They were not remotely similar in appearance. And yet the hens — like the woodpecker and the chickadee and the crow and the owl and the eagle and the vulture and the hummingbird and the ostrich and the puffin and the peacock — belong to the same class of animals.

What a remarkable diversity of life we have on this planet. Perhaps we would appreciate it more, as a species, if humans weren’t so homocentric. Even our own class, Mammalia, contains more than 5,000 species. We’re just one animal among many, many others.