Word: flightless
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...frigate birds, which use Aldabra as their major Indian Ocean nesting site, blot out the rays of the sun. Thousands of rare giant land tortoises, some 4-ft. across and weighing as much as 600 Ibs., creep across the pitted coral and ridged limestone surface of the island. Tiny flightless rails nestle amidst Aldabra's bushy scrub and mangrove forests, while above them swoop red-footed boobies, sacred ibises and fruit-eating bats. Twenty of the island's plant species are nonexistent elsewhere in the world; so are a host of its insect inhabitants...
...only words with five letters or less, and though many are of foreign origin (e.g., baht, the monetary unit of Siam; alif, the first letter of the Arabian alphabet), most are eminently usable in the U.S. Botanists and biologists may already know about corms (short, bulblike stems) and wekas (flightless New Zealand wading birds...
...carcass intact for thousands of years. In temperate New Zealand there was no permafrost but in South Island's Pyramid Valley paleontologists have found a good substitute. From about 18,000 B.C. until 2,-000 years ago, the valley contained a swamp whose lush vegetation attracted moas-great, flightless birds which weighed up to a quarter...
...including the giant moa twelve feet tall. They had scrapped their flying apparatus because they didn't need it; there were few ground enemies to zoom away from. But when man (first the Maoris, then the whites) arrived in New Zealand, bringing along dogs, cats and rats, the flightless birds had a tough time. Some went the way of the dodo...
Albatross & Wild Goat. "The wild life was sport, too-the six-inch penguins, flightless cormorants, pelicans, flamingos. At night, albatross dueled with their bills. The wild goats did the policing, ate all the waste paper...