For your enlightenment and amazement, here is the tale about the natural history of the Ono Bird.

The ono bird is a species that has only been found on a few of the islands way out in the southwest Pacific. It’s a very large marine bird that’s a distant cousin of the albatross. Like the latter, it has a wingspan that can go over three meters.

The albatross, by the way, is nicknamed the “gooney bird” because it’s very clumsy when it lands on solid earth. They’re very graceful birds in the air, and are powerful flyers with that ten-foot spread, but when they land, they generally go head-over-heels, rolling and bouncing for many feet. If you see film of that spectacle, it looks as though their legs just aren’t hooked up right, or that they simply aren’t capable of keeping up with the birds’ landing speed.

Anyway, back to the ono birds. At any rate, the most distinctive aspect of the onos is that they (maybe due to their hereditary ties to the albatross), too, possess a peculiarity concerning their legs — in their case, they’re very short, given the size of the bird. An adult’s are usually only about 16 cm long.

Other physical distinctions of the otherwise-white ono include blue secondary wing feathers (those on the trailing edge, analogous to the location of the flaps on an airplane wing) on both sexes, and the males are graced with very large (and pink, albeit very light pink) testicles.

Back during World War Two, Americans first came into contact with the onos when our Marines were pressing their island-hopping campaign across the Pacific to the Japanese homeland. Of course, countless generations of the islanders on whose turf much of the Pacific War was fought had known these birds, and it was they who gave them the name we use even today.

Many, many years ago, the ancestors of those aboriginal people noticed that many of the birds had a very distinctive call that they voiced upon landing on the beach.

Upon closer investigation, it was found that the females of the species alit silently, whereas, the males almost always emitted a series of loud calls, “Oh, no! Oh, no! Oh, no!” just before touching down on their short 16 cm legs — and their large 25 cm testicles.