Paragraph on “Can all Birds fly?” complete paragraph for Class 9, Class 10, Class 11 and Class 12

Can all Birds fly?

Millions of years ago, before the earth began to break up into the shapes of the continents and islands as we know them today, most birds could fly. But as the oceans covered strips of land which once connected land masses, and continents began to form by earth movements, animals which could not fly, unlike the birds, became restricted to certain parts of the earth. This meant that many of these animals, which were predators of birds, were cut off from their prey. So several species of birds no longer had any need to fly for their life !

Therefore, through an evolutionary process, which simply means development through change over many years, some birds came to spend more time on land or in the water, rather than in the air. Among the ancestors of these flightless birds then are the penguin and the ostrich family. This includes all penguins of the Antarctic ; the ostriches of Africa and south-west Asia ; the emu and the cassowary of  Australasia ; the rhea of South America, the kiwi of New Zealand ; and formerly the moa, also of New Zealand, which is now extinct.