>All the while, the bird was zipping along at 90-170 km/h (56-106 mph). Given that these birds generally cruise at 10-60 km/h (6-37 mph), at his top speed
I assume the higher speed is "across the ground" but it's possible he flew his usual airspeed the whole time.
The thing about storms is that the wind changes abruptly all the time. Maybe the bird knows how to navigate it, but it's not a safe environment for balloons like people used as example downthread.
Where the bird was flying the wind did not change abruptly all the time, that only happens in the turbulent lower atmosphere. Higher up the wind is more constant, in the case of a hurricane/typhoon in a constant vortex. The bird was caught in something resembling a local jet stream, circling around the storm's centre while being carried along.
but wouldn't the wind exert some pressure on the back of the bird? wouldn't it not generate any lift otherwise and just drop back to the ground? like sails on a sailboat, for the sailors it feels like there is no wind, but the sails are carrying massive pressure
If you’re in a boat in a river, your “natural” speed is the speed of the river. Same with air.
You point about a sailboat and wind is confused; the pressure comes from the fact that the boat is traveling at one speed through the water and at a different speed through the air.
ok, if the bird's natural speed is that of the ambient air, then how does it stay up? the bird is not lighter than air, so where does the upwards pressure on the bird come from? either the bird must flap its wings to stay up or there must be speed difference between the bird and the ambient air to generate lift.
There is a speed difference between birds and the ambient air. Birds don't just drift aimlessly with the wind, they flap their wings and gain airspeed. But from their perspective, the "speed" at which they're flying is entirely relative to the mass of air, and not the ground.
This isn't some mystery, it's the same way boats and planes work. Consider a plane flying at 100 knots of airspeed. If the mass of air they're in is moving perpendicular to the plane at 50 knots, the plane will track diagonally across the ground even though it's pointed forward. The plane won't experience side loads because it's tracking 50 units sideways (with respect to the ground) for every 100 units it moves forwards, the exact same as the "wind". If the plane is instead in a 100 knot headwind, it will be stationary with respect to the ground. It won't drop out of the air, but it also won't make headway to its destination either.
From a mechanics perspective, neither the plane nor the bird care about what the ground is doing once they're airborne. The only thing they care about is the mass of air they're aloft in.
that is my point - in order to stay up, the bird would need to either flap its wings for 700 miles non-stop (unlikely) in order to maintain velocity difference between it and the ambient air OR glide which basically means he was not traveling at the speed of ambient air, otherwise there would be no lift pressure generated on his wings and he would drop to the ground
Ignore the storm for a moment, and ask whether a bird can fly for 7h+, either from flapping, gliding, or navigating updrafts. The answer is yes, that's trivial for many many bird species, especially those with a propensity for ocean travel. The storm then just changes the baseline ground speed.
The comparison with the balloon is perhaps not entirely accurate since birds like you say, fly using lift from the wings. So they need to have some relative speed vs the air.
The point is that as long as the entire body of air the bird is flying through is moving uniformly and without acceleration, it's perceptually indistinguishable from calm air (except visually, and even that only when flying pretty low).
For rotating and turbulent air, which would both not be totally unheard of in a hurricane, this probably doesn't apply though.
This is probably like when you swim out at the beach, and back and find you are 20m away from where you started due to currents. But you didn’t feel it.
With dead reckoning you could probably figure out.
You can’t feel linear/unaccelerated motion, and biological organisms aren’t great at indirectly deriving it from acceleration and rotation over time the way inertial navigation systems do.
A sailboat uses the speed difference between the water (basically stationary) and the wind. A bird (or sailplane) just moves along with the wind. Birds and sailplanes can however hang around areas of rising air to overcome their natural sink rate.
When you're flying, wind is no longer the air moving over the ground, it's the ground moving under the air. It doesn't produce acceleration except for a brief moment when you leave the ground.
>for the sailors it feels like there is no wind, but the sails are carrying massive pressure
The only way this is possible is if the sails are moving at a different airspeed than the sailors, which is only possible if 1) the sailor is running up and down the deck or 2) there is an windspeed gradient with altitude, which the sails penetrate by virtue of being tall.
To me, that is WAY more impressive (so is the 4700m altitude!). The bird got completely tossed around for hours in extremely high winds and then still navigated back to it's breeding ground.
> The bird got completely tossed around for hours in extremely high winds and then still navigated back to it's breeding ground.
And I got lost on one of the simplest hiking trails in a neighboring town last week. I tried to go off-path to circumvent a fallen tree. After about 15 minutes of thinking that I was just steps from reaching my destination, I ended up back at my starting point! I'm ashamed.
Not sure why this was flagged dead. It's a fact that some birds are sensitive to magnetic fields [1]:
> They do this with the help of the magnetically sensitive proteins in their eyes and the magneto-receptive cells in the vestibular nucleus in their brain.
The compass allows me to track in which direction I'm roughly blown. Not on the scale of seconds, but hours. As soon as I escape the typhoon, I can start going back.
Bird lungs work very differently from mammals. They have air sacs in front of and behind the lungs that take up a significant portion of their body cavity. The lungs themselves don't expand or compress. Air moves unidirectionally through the lungs both during inhalation and exhalation so there is no time at which the lungs themselves are not operating optimally. It is a two-phase system... during inhalation the posterior air sac fills with fresh air as spent air accumulates in the anterior air sac. The effective blood gas exchange surface area is about double that of mammals as well.
Basically: bird lungs are "pipelined" and highly optimized to extract oxygen even at altitude.
A reminder of just how far back in genetic history birds and mammals went separate ways. Another being that birds have no X or Y chromosomes -- their genetic machinery for sex is very different from ours.
And no neocortex. Smart birds like ravens rely on a traditional system of ganglia to be smart, not on that hyped six-layered neocortex covering most of the brain.
I believe the ancestor of bird lungs first evolved in a branch of theropoda. I'm not sure what drove that adaptation but it proved useful fodder when much later the avia branch of theropoda evolved flight. This also mirrors feathers which seem to have evolved long before flight. It is likely small lightweight avia already possessed feathers, light bones, and efficient lungs which allowed them to do a tiny bit of gliding in their jumps and that is what led to flight. Once flight exists there's really strong pressure to optimize to the limit given the metabolic cost of flying.
Mammals descend from synapsids which branched off before sauropsids branched off into theropoda, reptiles, etc.
Seems the ones who live on the Japanese islands do this as standard practice.
Like their bigger cousins they use dynamic soaring.
A technique for harvesting energy from the wind by up and down oscillations to cover distance rather expending muscle energy flapping their wings.
Afaik they can also lock their wings into glide mode with tendons without causing muscle fatigue to maintain flight for days on end.
Also using unihemispheric slow wave sleep aids in that as well.
Happened to me, in a canoe on a large lake. I had a lot of experience on small lakes, but large lakes also have large waves. Hadn't planned on that. It was either 'go with the waves' or go under
Never mind this bird's journey. The most surprising thing about this is that they apparently have GPS trackers that are small and light enough to attach to a bird and have long enough battery life to be able to track them over longer periods of time.
I assume they don't catch the bird on a daily basis to replace the batteries.
>GPS loggers (13–14 g, 2–3% of body mass; PinPoint VHF-GPS, LOTEK) were attached to the back feathers using waterproof tape (Tesa). The loggers were set to record the geographic position every 15 min and send data via radio communication to the receiver placed within the breeding colony when birds returned from the sea. The tracking duration of the birds ranged from 8.9 to 34.2 days (mean ± S.D.: 24.8 ± 6.8 days).
Reminds me of the people who have accidentally parachuted or para-glided through a cumulonimbus clouds, the stories are insane. Getting spun until they vomit, getting hit by tennis ball sized hail, frostbite, lightning and thunders meters away
Maybe we could also solve some problem of garbage dumps? Build all the garbage dumps on a route of frequent cyclones and the trash just disappears the next Tuesday!
We're calling it... Sailr, the revolutionary green sea travel technology, it uses the power of our app to capture the wind to drive a turbine to generate electricity that charges your phone which you can then plug into our cybertwirl that propels your boat. Only $14,99 per month, in the App Store and Play Store.
Based on the map, showing data both before and after the circular typhoon-caught pattern, I take it the bird survived? That's... I hope they didn't get hurt at all, but that sounds rather epic from the bird's perspective in retrospect!
> Regardless, looking at this wild ride highlights the increasing risks that seabird populations could face as climate change drives more extreme weather events.
Is this hurricane really an outcome of "climate change"?
The increase in hurricanes is, yes. To claim specific hurricane is a direct result of climate change is probably not meaningful - they're all related to climate, and climate change is causing more to occur.
Precisely. When you keep rolling double sixes, check to see if the dice are normal. Climate change paints a "6" on more than one face of each die. Hence the so-called (now misnomer) "century storm" happening multiple times in one decade.
I assume the higher speed is "across the ground" but it's possible he flew his usual airspeed the whole time.