Condor bird3/15/2023 ![]() In light of these findings, Williams plans to further investigate the in-flight decision-making process made by condors to understand just how these birds are able to locate the invisible airflows that allow for the absolute minimum of movement costs. Birds may therefore arrive in the right place for a thermal, but at the wrong time.” Thermals can behave like lava lamps, with bubbles of air rising intermittently from the ground when the air is warm enough. These risks are higher when moving between thermal updrafts. The condors were seen to flap more as they reached the end of the glides between thermals, when they were likely to be closer to the ground.” Sergio Lambertucci explained: “This is a critical time as birds need to find rising air to avoid an unplanned landing. Our findings suggest that in-flight decisions of when and where to land and when to move between airflows are crucial, as not only do condors need to be able to take off again after landing, but unnecessary landings will add significantly to their overall flight costs.”Įmily Shepard, who is part of Swansea Lab for Animal Movement, said: “Closer examination showed the challenges the birds faced as they moved between weak thermals. Hannah Williams, who helped conduct the research while at Swansea University and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior, says: “Soaring birds fly under weather conditions that allow them to stay airborne with the absolute minimum of movement costs, but there are times when these birds must resort to extremely costly flapping flight. However, once in the sky condors can sustain soaring for long periods in a wide range of wind and thermal conditions - one bird managed to clock up five hours without flapping, covering around 172 kilometers or more than 100 miles. Their findings will help to improve understanding about large birds’ capacity for soaring and the specific circumstances that make flight costly.ĭuring the study, the researchers discovered that more than 75 per cent of the condors’ flapping was associated with take off. The team wanted to find out more about how birds’ flight efforts vary depending on environmental conditions. These log each and every wingbeat and twist and turn in flight as condors search for food. The study, part of a collaboration between Emily Shepard and Hannah Williams from Swansea University and Sergio Lambertucci in Argentina, uses high-tech flight-recorders on Andean condors. The world’s heaviest soaring bird– the Andean condor – actually flaps its wings for one per cent of its flight time. Instead they make use of air currents to keep them airborne for hours at a time. Previous studies have shown that white storks and osprey flap for 17% and 25% of their overland migratory flights, respectively.When it comes to flying the largest of birds don’t rely on flapping to move around. The difference can be likened to pedalling a bicycle uphill versus coasting downhill, said Bret Tobalske, a bird flight expert at the University of Montana, who was not involved in the study. Scientists who study flying animals generally consider two types of flight: flapping flight and soaring flight. Learning to ride air currents allows some to travel long distances while minimising the exertion of beating their wings. ![]() To birds, the sky is not empty but a landscape of invisible features: wind gusts, currents of warm rising air and streams of air pushed upward by ground features such as mountains. “The finding that they basically almost never beat their wings and just soar is mind-blowing,” said David Lentink, an expert in bird flight at Stanford University, who was not involved in the research. The results were published on Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Condors are expert pilots but we just had not expected they would be quite so expert,” said Prof Emily Shepard, a study co-author and biologist at Swansea University in Wales. One bird flew more than five hours, covering more than 100 miles (160km), without flapping its wings. Incredibly, the birds spent just 1% of their time aloft flapping their wings, mostly during takeoff. For the first time, a team of scientists strapped recording equipment they called “daily diaries” to eight condors in Patagonia to record each wingbeat over more than 250 hours of flight time.
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