Elephant bird determined that "Vorombe titan" reached weights of and stood tall, making it the world's largest bird, slightly larger than the much older "Dromornis stirtoni". Elephant birds have been extinct since at least the 17th century. Étienne de Flacourt, a French governor of Madagascar in the 1640s and 1650s, mentions an ostrich-like bird said to inhabit unpopulated regions, though it is unclear whether he was repeating folk tales passed on from generations earlier. In 1659, Flacourt wrote of the "vouropatra – a large bird which haunts the Ampatres and lays eggs like the ostriches; so that the people of these places
Bird nest be difficult to flush from the nest. Most ground-nesting species have well-developed distraction displays, which are used to draw (or drive) potential predators from the area around the nest. Most species with this type of nest have precocial young, which quickly leave the nest upon hatching. In cool climates (such as in the high Arctic or at high elevations), the depth of a scrape nest can be critical to both the survival of developing eggs and the fitness of the parent bird incubating them. The scrape must be deep enough that eggs are protected from the convective cooling caused by