On Feb 21, 2010, at 5:41 PM, Augusto Haro <augustoharo@gmail.com> wrote:
A bad for all flight specializations seems to be the puffin. Unles you consider subaqueous flight as a kind of real flight, which is the specialization which makes the puffin so bad on the air. Perhaps, and unless the occurrence of a great morphological saltation, some flying ancestor of flightless neornitheans was a "poor flier".
I would consider aquaflying to be a form of flight. Even with that aside, puffins are excellent at the speed game -they can sustain speeds over 60mph. Given that shearwaters aquafly with long wings, it would seem that puffins are adapted to swim well and fly fast, rather than giving up flight ability for swimming.
Cheers, --Mike H.