My daughter recently had the experience of a large bird hitting her car windscreen, and smashing it, when she was doing about 70mph on a motorway. Fortunately the bird did not come through the screen, and there was no damage to life or limb (other than presumably to the poor bird).
As she was near Liverpool her first thought was that it had been a seagull, and later a pigeon. But the person who fitted a new windscreen said he thought it was a pheasant, as they are apparently notorious for this problem. The reason, he explained, is that pheasants have a shallow 'take-off' path. They run along the ground to get airborne.
But it made me wonder whether birds 'take-off'. Is there no other way of describing their going from rest into flight? Should it be 'take flight'?
Best Answer
Actually, take-off is the proper term for that stage of bird flight.
I remember reading about take off angles in wild turkeys and bred turkeys (to stock the forests), that wild turkeys had a steeper angle of incline than those that were raised in sanctuaries. From this, they could tell how much interbreeding was being done in the wild after release (the more wild genes, the steeper).
An article in the Journal of Experimental Biology (Effects of Body Size on Take-off Flight Performance in Phasianidae [Aves]) studied take off angles in Pheasants and other birds in that family.
They cite other studies of bird take offs from hummingbirds to swans...
before getting down to their own work:
One of their conclusions (a simple one comparatively):
From another study from the scientific literature (this one measuring seasonal differences and take-off angles):
Anyway, you get the picture. Apparently ornithologists refer to 'lift off' as take off (with or without the hyphen). It starts with the first downbeat of the wings once the feet are no longer in contact with any surface.