FLIGHT PATH

Speed, grace, endurance - birds are nature's ultimate aviators. Now scientists have discovered even more about their aerial adaptations...

- LAURIE WINKLESS

HUMANS HAVE BEEN FASCINATED BY BIRDS FOR up to millennia. Images of owls, cranes and emus adorn cave art sites believed to be 40,000 years old. Birds have been revered in religions and cultures throughout time and across regions, while flight itself plays an important role in myth and legend. From the Athabaskan stories that explain why only some birds migrate to the legend of Icarus who made his own wings, humans have always looked to the sky for inspiration.

Yet it wasn’t until the early 1900s that we found a way to fly. And, unsurprisingly, we did it through lessons learned from our feathered friends. We adopted the lightly curved shape of a bird’s wing – an aerofoil – and designed planes around it, because it was so efficient at managing airflow. The Wright brothers, too, owe much of their success to birdwatching. It was by observing buzzards soar above a river gorge – and how they twist their wingtips when they turn – that they solved the manoeuvrability issues that had plagued their craft.

The powerful wing muscles, porous bones and variety of wing and feather shapes that have evolved in birds have inspired many technologies. But scientists are discovering that bird flight isn’t solely about cutting through the air. It seems that a number of species use specialist features to actively manipulate the air as they fly, giving them the evolutionary upper hand… or wing.