A new study sheds light on just how efficiently the world’s largest soaring bird rides air currents to stay aloft for hours without flapping its wings.
The Andean condor has a wingspan stretching more than 3m and weighs up to 15kg, making it the heaviest soaring bird alive today.
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.
Photo: AP
Incredibly, the birds spent just 1 percent of their time aloft flapping their wings, mostly during take-off.
One bird flew more than five hours, covering more than 160km, without flapping its wings.
“Condors are expert pilots — but we just hadn’t expected they would be quite so expert,” said Emily Shepard, a study co-author and biologist at Swansea University in Wales.
The results were published on Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“The finding that they basically almost never beat their wings and just soar is mind-blowing,” said David Lentink, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University and an expert in bird flight, who was not involved in the research.
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.
Learning to ride air currents allows some birds to travel long distances while minimizing the exertion of beating their wings.
Scientists who study flying animals generally consider two types of flight: flapping flight and soaring flight.
The difference can be compared to peddling 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.
Past studies have shown that white storks and osprey flap for 17 percent and 25 percent of their overland migratory flights respectively.
The Andean condor’s extreme skill at soaring is essential for its scavenger lifestyle, which requires hours a day of circling high mountains looking for a meal of carrion, said Sergio Lambertucci, a study co-author and a biologist at the National University of Comahue in Argentina.
“When you see condors circling, they are taking advantage of those thermal uplifts,” or rising gusts of warm air, he said.
The recording devices were programmed to fall off the birds after about a week, but retrieving them was not so easy.
“Sometimes the devices dropped off into nests on huge cliffs in the middle of the Andes mountains, and we needed three days just to get there,” Lambertucci said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
RSS