Birds that live on islands, like the kiwi, are often incapable of flight. That’s because birds populated these islands back when they could fly, then found that the islands were predator-free paradises and lost the ability to fly because it just wasn’t that important anymore. Mammalian predators can’t cross vast oceans the way birds can, so it was kind of like hitting the birdy jackpot.

New Zealand is a great example of this. At one time, there were 32 species of flightless bird on the islands of New Zealand. Today, there are only 16. So what happened? People moved in and brought other mammals with them, and the mammals ate many of the birds.

According to National Geographic, island birds lose the ability to fly remarkably often. In fact there are at least 1,000 different examples of this happening during evolutionary history. Even island birds that do still fly show signs of one day becoming flightless — they have characteristics like weaker flight muscles and longer legs.

The kiwi is a somewhat extreme example of what happens when you’re a bird that’s safe from predators. It looks kind of like a tribble with a beak and what’s left of its wings are only about an inch long, and are tipped by a weird claw that is just as useless as the rest of the wing.

Tristan da Cunha is widely believed to be the most remote island in the world. It’s 1,750 miles from South Africa and almost 2,100 miles from South America. Its closest neighbor is the island of Saint Helena, which is 1,500 miles away. So how exactly does a bird become extinct when living on the most remote island in the world? Well, people live there, too, so …

According to a study published by PLOS ONE, the flightless moorhen that was endemic to Tristan da Cunha became extinct in the 19th century and was replaced by another flightless moorhen that used to only live on the nearby island of Gough. So being flightless hasn’t come between the moorhen and its desire to live on a remote island paradise. Good for it.

Both of these populations of moorhens can/could catch a little bit of air, much like a chicken, but they aren’t/weren’t capable of real flight. Other moorhens, which look kind of like a cross between a duck and a chicken, will fly but don’t do it very well. The Gough Moorhen is stockier than the common moorhen (found in Europe, South America, Asia, and Africa), but more importantly, it has stubbier wings, so it’s not able to do much more than flap pathetically. But that didn’t stop it from moving on to bigger and better islands, so if nothing else the Gough moorhen should at least be role model following your dreams. 

The Guam rail is a bit like a roadrunner in that running is totally its thing, and flying is not. The main differences between a roadrunner and a Guam rail are that a Guam rail doesn’t drop anvils on coyotes and isn’t able to fly at all (the roadrunner will fly in order to escape a predator — if only the Looney Tunes version had known that).

According to the National Zoo, the Guam rail is a small bird, with a maximum size of around 11 inches. It was once found only on Guam, but today it lives on the nearby islands of Rota and Cocos, because like so many other flightless island birds it fell victim to an invasive species. While a lot of island birds succumb to mammalian predators, the Guam rail was nearly eradicated by the brown tree snake, an 8-foot long predator that probably arrived on American cargo ships in 1944. The snakes didn’t just eat most of the Guam rails, they also ate 10 other native birds to extinction. The snakes are still on Guam, which is why the rails now live exclusively on nearby islands.

The flightless cormorant is another example of an island bird. This species hails from Galapagos, the birthplace of Darwin’s theory of evolution. According to Discovering Galapagos, it is the only one of all 29 species of cormorant that doesn’t fly — the rest of them are actually pretty great aviators and some, like the double crested cormorant, are migratory.

Because it did all of its recent evolving on an island, the Galapagos cormorant became adept at swimming and lost the need for its wings, which are now almost comically diminutive. The bird got bigger, and is in fact the largest of all cormorants, with the biggest specimens weighing as much as 11 pounds.

These birds are great swimmers, but they don’t swim the way penguins do. Instead, they have evolved especially powerful hind legs and they use them kind of like propellers to move through the water.

Like just about every other island, humans messed up the cormorant’s island paradise by introducing dogs, cats, rodents, and (weirdly) donkeys. The only predators that are endemic to the Galapagos Islands are birds. The largest of these is the Galapagos hawk, which mostly eats insects, lizards, and small birds.

The weka is another flightless New Zealander. It’s chicken-sized and looks a little bit like someone stuck a bird’s head on a feathered coconut. According to New Zealand Birds Online, weka are a conundrum for the locals — tourists love them because they’re cute and bold and they aren’t afraid to ask for handouts. The locals get frustrated by them because they’re fearless scavengers. Much like the American raccoon, they often raid gardens and chicken coops. Also like raccoons, they’re protected, so you can’t trap or kill them without government permission.

Like so many other flightless island birds, weka are extinct in parts of New Zealand, probably because of invasive animals like ferrets and dogs. Some subspecies are considered threatened, but you can’t really move them around to other islands because they can threaten the endemic species on those islands. So conserving these birds can be a challenge, especially since the alternative — eradicating invasive predators — is expensive and maybe even impossible.

The weka’s closest flying relative is the banded rail, which is only about 1/6th to 1/3rd the size of a weka, but probably thinks it’s so much cooler.

Most parrots can fly, though they seem to prefer sitting on pirates’ shoulders and eating saltines. There is one exception to this rule, though: the kakapo. You won’t be at all surprised to hear that this flightless parrot hails from New Zealand. Biologists of yore named it Strigops habroptilus, which means “owl-face soft-feather.” If you look at one face-on you can see why — the kakapo has a heart-shaped face like an owl and does look pretty soft, though you could also say that about an ostrich so it’s kind of a weird distinction.

According to Wired, the kakapo is the only flightless parrot, and this bird doesn’t even pretend like it can fly the way chickens do. It never flaps its wings. Instead, they’re just there for balance and occasionally parachuting. The kakapo can climb trees and sometimes uses its wings to slow itself down when jumping to the forest floor. 

Kakapos also make great pets, because they like people and you don’t have to clip their wings. You can’t actually own a kakapo, though, because like so many other flightless island birds they are endangered. There are currently only about 150 kakapos left in the wild.

The giant coot doesn’t live on an island. It lives in the Andes mountains in lakes and bogs, and doesn’t fly mostly because it’s too fat to do so.

The giant coot is one of the two largest species of rail. Adults weigh between 4.5 and 6 pounds, have disproportionately small heads and bright red, yellow, and white beaks. Although giant coots are considered flightless birds, it’s really only the adults that don’t fly. According to oiseaux-birds.com, juveniles can and do fly, and continue to do so until they grow too large to successfully become airborne. So while other flightless birds lost the physical structures necessary for flight (ratites don’t have keels, for example, which are the bones that the powerful flight muscles attach to), giant coots are just too big to use those structures. So really, giant coots are kind of like the bird evolution version of Homer Simpson.

Giant coots live at high altitudes — up to 21,000 feet, in fact — and they build their nests on platforms in deeper water, which helps to keep predators at bay. Being a long way away from things that might want to eat them is also a good strategy for the adults, since they can’t really escape predators the way most other birds do.

If you grew up in the 1980s, you’ll likely remember the cartoon Tasmanian Devil, an ugly werewolf looking thing that traveled in a tornado and ate everything in its path. You were probably disappointed to discover that the real Tasmanian devil looks kind of like a large rat crossed with a ferret and has a top speed of about 8 miles per hour.

The animal that should have been traveling in a tornado is the Tasmanian native hen, which could have also given Road Runner a run for his money. Native hens can achieve ground speeds of 30 miles per hour (compared to the roadrunner’s comparatively wussy 20 miles per hour). According to ABC, today, native hens only exist on the island of Tasmania. They were once also present in Australia, but humans came between them and their long-term survival.

Unlike flightless island birds and even the lake dwellers of the Andes, it’s a mystery how and why the Tasmanian native hen lost its ability to fly. These birds have always been surrounded by predators, yet for some reason flight still wasn’t useful enough to keep. But hey, who needs flight when you’ve got speed? There aren’t too many predators that can keep up with prey moving at 30 mph, except maybe a cheetah, and they’re on a different continent.

There are four species of steamer duck, and three of them can’t fly. One of these is the Falkland Island steamer duck, which lost the ability to fly in the usual way — by colonizing some predator-free islands off the coast of South America.

Interestingly, this duck isn’t the only steamer duck on the Falkland Islands, but it is the only one of the two that can’t fly. The other endemic duck is simply called the flying steamer duck, for obvious reasons. At least 25% of male flying steamer ducks are non-flying steamer ducks, though, so the species does seem to be moving in the same direction as its flightless cousins. Even more interestingly, the flying steamer ducks and the Falkland Island steamer ducks aren’t actually cousins at all — recent analysis has discovered that the two populations are actually genetically identical.

The other two flightless steamer ducks live on the mainland, so it’s not like safety from predators was the only reason why any of these ducks lost the ability to fly. Instead, a study published by the Proceedings of the Royal Society hypothesized that a bigger body and smaller wings gives the steamer ducks advantages like better diving skills and efficient locomotion in water. And they don’t need to migrate, either, because they live in a place that’s hospitable all year long.