i made a silly one-off comment about carrying around yinglets but i think it's actually kind of a fun birdsona thing so im gonna write it up
so what exactly is my maximum takeoff mass anyway? if i wanna carry a lil buddy around, can i actually do that?
and like, from the outset, humanoid scale avians don't reeeeeeeally make sense. the square-cube law works against you pretty hard (cube in this case, being body volume and therefore mass, and the square being your lift-generating wing surface area)
but numbers are just guidelines and when they get in the way of having fun, we can just throw them out
but im a catbird which is still a medium-ish sized songbird and not a big, powerful, efficient flyer like ospreys1 and eagles. actual catbirds carry around like, twigs and grasses and maybe some bugs and bits of fruit. and i think it's sort of fun to like, sort of approximately resemble the original creature im based on!
so completely out of the air with no math whatsoever im just going to say, lift capacity of around 12kg comfortably, to 16kg max with a lot of effort and good takeoff conditions (headwind, long "runway," high perch). maybe very slightly higher under duress, but that would be very taxing and my range before i just fell out of the sky from exhaustion would be very short
i figure yeah, for a roughly humanoid sized creature, that would be a very easy load to carry on foot - the pack i carry to work every day with all my stuff in it is about half that and i go about 8km/day without slowing down or really feeling any extra burden from it, so it feels right as a ballpark number
anyway, the takeaway is i could probably carry a small yinglet or a mediumish one with some extra effort
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ospreys are actually exceptional at this - i think their lift capacity is something like half of their entire body mass? and they're divers who aren't particularly waterproof so they need the wing strength to drag a big, reluctant fish out of the water while also lifting all that excess absorbed water weight