Untitled

cattle egret

Or even fancy landing and braking

landing

Wow, wow, wow....wow wow wow wow !!!! (I'm speechless.)

Mark , thank you for your answer and additional postings. Why did I ask? I have been interested in the aerodynamics of bird flight for a long time - though I did not follow the literature for about 20 years and a lot will have happened since. I call myself a "biophysicist". basically this is a person who does not really know physics nor biology .-P Aerodynamics and bird-flight is far away from my line of work -so I know even less there- but its hard to stop a curious mind.

 

In your images I see great examples for quite a few aspects of the topic. A great image to see the upward bending of wing tips as studied in great detail and observed by many before is the Caracara image. While soaring (and here probably circling) this bird produces a lot of lift. The pressure difference between top and underside of the wings leads to the excellently documented effect of the wing tips bending upwards. Interestingly the 4 major feathers at the tip curl up like "winglets". This is supposed to significantly reduce the "induced" drag (something by a few % which is a lot) that is a major factor whenever wings produce a lot of lift. This is an old "invention" by soaring birds and is copied by some wing designs of modern planes, powered and soaring gliders. The fact that the wingtips are designed to have not one large but several small tips is most likely also helpful to reduce drag. Any wingtip will form turbulences in flight. The resulting drag increases approximately with the square of the size of the vortex. Knowing that, it is easy to conclude then, that the sum of several small tips and their turbulences (this is linear and not square) produce less drag than one single large tip. This would be different for fast flight conditions and we do not see this in swifts for example.

 

As I said this is known a long time. New for me - at least in such a clear image - was the upward bending of the tips under non-soaring conditions on the forward swing of the wings. In this situation, pointing into the flight direction, - I wonder- the wing tips would produce unwanted resistance, unless the bird wanted to slow down, or needs this to stabilize the flight path by producing some lift in the front to compensate the extended neck? Perhaps this is out of control and just happens, perhaps it is of such short duration that the effect is minimal. The image just got me to think that you should get together with people studying bird flight - they might just be very interested. You certainly started my interest in bird flight again - and thanks for that. Anyway I like the discussion following posted images.

Cheers

Walter

I like this photo esp. the sharpenness. THe rest, most of them are great. Posting them here ruined the surprise factor. Keep up the good work. Regards.

Dof, composition and contrast all great!

A good photo, perhaps very good, given the interesting wing position. The muted colors keep it from being really dramatic.

 

My favorite in this vast collection is the 'braking' shot. I hope you'll upload it separately.

Walter: it was my pleasure. I also learned something new from you and that is great. If you ever have more question please email me anytime.

 

Carl: in fact I did (uploaded braking shot) not long ago and deleted it after few hours because of some very low ratings; it should be back when they give us an option to disable ratings :)

 

Many thanks go to everybody for all comments.

 

Best regards,

 

Mark

 

I rarely rate bird shots ... but this one is perfection and a very excellent shot indeed. In fact, the whole series ... quality abounds!

The background really makes this shot. The DOF is about perfect and you have captured a bird in flight very well, keeping sharpness on the face and most of the body. As I see the rest of what you have posted, you definitely have the knack of getting some great in-flight shots.

You are one hell of an awesome bird photographer!!!

Beautiful shot!!! A7/O7