One high noon, many years ago, when I was myself barely fledged, and was an undergraduate at a "large Eastern university," I spotted three well-known members of the humanities faculty on the hunt for lunch. They were Ephim Fogel, David Grossvogel, and Don Kleine. An unforgettable assemblage! Fogel, Grossvogel and Kleine, I thought — sounds like the name of a law firm invented by Tom Pynchon.
I had not reflected on this — to me — amusing incident until this week, when I was reading the bird book that I mentioned in a previous post. There I discovered that the largest known bird was the recently extinct elephant bird, a distant Madagascan cousin of the ostrich, which stood 10 feet tall and tipped the scale at 880 pounds. Its eggs were 3 feet in circumference and would have provided three chicken-size egg omelets for about 55 people. I also learned that the smallest bird is the bee hummingbird which the calipers says is two inches long and which weighs .06 of an ounce. Its egg is the size of a pea, which means than it would take a small flock of hummingbirds many days to make me a decent breakfast.
Here's a bee hummingbird: 
And here's an imaginative reconstruction of the elephant bird, a grossvogel if there ever was one.
They are not drawn to scale.
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