How Birds Swerve and Avoid Crashing While in Flight (VIDEO)

Birds navigate the air at high speeds, swerving and turning to avoid obstacles in their way. Now, scientists have taken a closer look at the bird's innate ability to soar through the skies and have found that it uses two high stereotyped postures to avoid obstacles in flight.

Most other research into bird flight has focused on "clear-sky" flying. This is where birds simply soar and flap, not having to avoid obstacles. This latest study, though, focuses on how once birds identify gaps between obstacles, they adjust their in-flight posture to squeeze through spaces.

"A big part of biological motion is energy minimization and robustness," said David Williams, one of the researchers, in a news release. "You want to be able to get around without exhausting yourself, and if you do hit something, you don't want it to be something that's unrecoverable. You don't want to fall to the ground, or break a wing."

The scientists expected that the birds would adopt a range of postures in order to allow them to fit between obstacles of varying sizes. However, it seems as if this isn't the case.

"What we actually found was there are two very distinct, stereotyped postures that are adopted," said Williams. "We thought there would be body rotation. We thought there might be intermediate stages where they would pull their wings in a little bit. We thought there would be stages where they might have one wing up and one down. We thought it would be catch-as-catch-can, and it's not."

In the first posture, the wings paused; the birds' wings are held wide out, at the top of the upswing of their flapping. In the second posture, the birds tuck their wings back against their bodies, almost as if they were perched on a branch. This interrupts their wing beat cycle for shorter periods of time, so they tend to lose less height.

Going forward, the researchers hope to expand their study to include horizontal obstacles similar to tree limbs. The findings in the current study may offer insight into how unmanned aerial vehicles could be programmed to avoid obstacles.

The findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Want to learn more? Check out the video below, courtesy of Giphy.

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