Parakeet owner checking in...
The trouble is, when a bird flops around in panic, it frequently injures itself, sometimes quite severely, with broken feathers or even broken wings. And a bird with a broken wing is at risk for shock, which they can die of, too--just "shock". And a bird experiencing such an intense panic event that it gives itself two broken wings--well, that's very bad news, and if the bird survives it, you're amazed. (People go into shock when they get broken bones, too.) And if the bird with two already-broken wings
won't stop flopping madly around its cage--well, it's basically toast.
And even if they don't break anything, they have such fast metabolisms that they can literally wear themselves out and die of exhaustion and dehydration, if they're *always* in a state of panic. So, you want to prevent your caged bird from panicking and flopping around its cage. However, such terrestrial "panic events" tend to be limited. You remove the stimulus that sent the bird into fits (a strange cat, a loud noise, a sudden bright light), and the bird stops panicking.
But I would think that a bird suddenly thrust into zero G, from which effects there would be no escape or respite, would be so totally freaked out that he would die of it, either from exhaustion or by damaging himself badly.
And unlike humans, he wouldn't be able to understand that the reason it felt like he was continually falling was because the thingies in his semi-circular canals were floating free. No, I think he would just flop helplessly around his cage until he died.
I would surmise that this is why, as far as I can tell, they have never sent any birds up. I mean, talk about your potential PR disaster--people love birds, much more than they love the rats that normally go up in the shuttle, and the media fallout from a "sweet little birdie" beating itself to death in its cage within the first hour of the shuttle's flight would be unbelieveable. They might as well have Sean O'Keefe stand out in front of NASA headquarters and blow a parrot's brain out with a .45, live, on camera.
And even if they're not *sure* that this is what would happen to a bird in space, I'm guessing that nobody wants to be the one to take the chance of authorizing it and then having to deal with a possible media disaster.
And...even astronauts, who are professionals and who do this for a living, have trouble with weightlessness.
http://spaceboy.nasda.go.jp/note/yujin/e/yuj107_body_e.html
You could try to strap the bird's wings down and hope that he became acclimated in a few days, but I don't think he would ever get over the sense of "wrongness", and I think as soon as you took the restraints off, and he was free to flap his wings, whether he had room to actually fly or not, he would be overcome by panic once again, when he found that he couldn't fly normally, and you'd have to put the restraints back on, and you'd be back to Square One. All you would have established would be that a bird could be safely transported into space, but not whether it would be able to fly once it got there.
And if you did manage to get a bird acclimated to zero G, so that you could take the restraints off and it wouldn't panic, still you wouldn't want a bird flying free in the shuttle or the ISS anyway, while it figured out how to fly. So you'd have to take some sort of flight cage. A small bird like a zebra finch needs a cage that's at least 3 feet long, in order to be able to actually "fly", as opposed to "wing-assisted hopping around the cage". And my understanding was that space was limited on board the shuttles. They might not want to allot space on the shuttle for a big empty cage for a bird to use to learn to fly in zero G--if it doesn't die first.
