Birdy

of what I want.
    When I have all these birds in my flight cages it’s beautiful. It’s great to see a cage full of fine flying birds. These females fly much more than the males.
    There’re still two months before the breeding season starts, so I continue with flying experiments. It’s cold out in the aviary now, so I dress up in all my warm clothes when I go out to watch. I’ve got my mother convinced it’s all part of raising canaries.
    Now that the birds are full-grown, I experiment with flight feathers. A feather, if you look at it carefully, is incredible. It’s designed so that when pressure is put under it, no air can pass through. At the same time, air can pass through from the top easily. The feather has a hollow shaft with feeders for circulation of blood. On each side of the shaft grow out branches called barbs. These branch again into things called barbules which have little barbicles with hooks on the end. They all interlock and can be pulled apart or put together like a complicated fine-tooled zipper. The feather can be zipped and unzipped by the bird with its beak. This is what birds are doing when they run their feathers through their beaks; rezipping feathers that’ve come apart.
    Also, the feathers rotate on an axis, so they can be vertical on the upswing and horizontal on the down. All this complication is built into something weighing practically nothing; light as a feather. The feather is the thing I’m up against. Either I have to make something like it or learn to do without.
    I start pulling flight feathers from my hero birds, the ones who flew with their own weight hanging on their legs. I put the weights back on and pull one flight feather out from each wing. One gives up immediately. All that weight and now this. He sits on the bottom of the cage and tries to sleep. I take the weights off and let him free.He flies without trouble after a few minutes. Apparently, missing two flight feathers isn’t much to a canary if he isn’t weighted down. The other one manages flight of a sort. It’s a desperate frantic flight but he gets off the ground and makes it up to some of the first perches. I decide to leave the weights on and see how he compensates.
    At the end of a week there’s definite improvement. He gets so he can struggle his way to the top perch of the aviary. He stays up there most of the time and his flights down are hellish. They’re hardly flight, more plummeting nose dives. He spins down, missing all the perches, flapping his wings frantically. Still, he survives and manages the tough flight up again. I figure he’s suffered enough for science and take off the weights.
    In the meantime, I’m working nights on designs for mechanical feathers. I’m using designs like Venetian blinds, pivoting on pins. They close on the downstroke and open on the up. I use a bent driveshaft run by a rubber-band motor to make them flap. I’m making models in both balsa wood and thin aluminum. It’s going to take a tremendous amount of strength to activate enough flapping power in wings large enough to lift me. One big trouble is that birds flap their wings by pulling them forward on the upstroke and pushing back at the same time they flap down. It’s almost like a butterfly breaststroke in swimming. They trap air under the wings and push against it. The joint of a bird’s wing moves in a circle, clockwise into the direction of flight. It’s hard to work this out with a rubber-band motor. I get some of my models to fly but they won’t take off, they only fly when I launch them by hand. If I can’t get these little models to fly, I don’t have a chance.
    I’m still doing my exercises. I flap an hour in the morning and an hour at night. I try to twist my shoulders in circles, grabbing air under my armpits. That’s the way birds seem to do it. I’m flapping with weights in my hands now. My shoulders and neck are beginning to get bumpy. If I’m not careful, I walk around with my head sticking out in front of me.
    I work in the afternoons on the cages. It’s really great seeing them, all painted, with feed cups attached. I’ve painted the insides ofthe cages light blue. I have everything ready, newspaper in the floor of each cage and gravel on the newspaper. I’ll have to change all that about once a week. The nests are in place and there’s cuttlebone for each cage. I have feed in the seed cups and water in the automatic watering trough.
    The breeding lists are worked out and I