Hunmminbirds can fly through tiny gaps

 

Image curtesy of Jerome Gawe.

Joel Kontinen

High-speed cameras have revealed how hummingbirds negotiate their way through tiny gaps while in flight, which happens much too quickly for the human eye to properly see. 

The findings could inform new techniques for flying robots.

Marc Badger at the University of California, Berkeley says that !Hummingbirds feed on nectar and have to fly through tiny gaps in cluttered foliage as they flit from flower to flower. 

“When a dominant male would come and chase an intruder away, that intruder would fly through a bush,” he says. “And it’s sort of like ‘wow, how are they doing that?’ It looks like it literally just teleported to the other side of the bush.”

Badger and colleagues constructed an enclosure with a portal between two compartments to study this behaviour in four Anna’s hummingbirds (Calypte anna), with wingspans of around 12 centimetres and a mass between 4 and 5 grams. A flower-shaped feeder provided a sip of sugar solution in the opposite compartment to the bird each time it flew through the gap, encouraging it back to the other side.

The researchers set up high-speed cameras recording at 500 frames a second to film the birds as they passed through, and a computer program tracked the position of each bird’s bill and wing tips. The gap between the compartments was gradually reduced until it was just 6 centimetres wide, or half the hummingbirds’ wingspan.”

Yes, humminbids have intelligently designed wings. 

Biomimicry is a science that brings out that what God has designed. And what he did,  He did very well.,  

 

Source:

Matthew Sparkes, 2023, Hummingbirds have two amazing ways to fly through tiny gaps. New Scientist 9 November