ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2018
Mechanical power curve measured in the wake of pied flycatchers indicates modulation of parasite power across flight speeds.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 19 citations in OpenAlex.
- Flight energetics of barn swallows across speeds: high aerodynamic efficiency, but low energy conversion efficiency.The Journal of experimental biology · 2026Article
- Nightjars trade off cruising speed efficiency for hovering capabilities and link upstroke thrust production with restricted wing folding.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Span Efficiency of Flying Animals.Integrative and comparative biology · 2026Article
- Aerodynamic efficiency explains flapping strategies used by birds.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Flight activity and effort of breeding pied flycatchers in the wild, revealed with accelerometers and machine learning.The Journal of experimental biology · 2024Article
- Numerical assessment of wake-based estimation of instantaneous lift in flapping flight of large birds.PloS one · 2023Article
- A low-cost wind tunnel for bird flight experiments.Journal of ornithology · 2022Article
- Flying through gaps: how does a bird deal with the problem and what costs are there?Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- Bird wings act as a suspension system that rejects gusts.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- High aerodynamic lift from the tail reduces drag in gliding raptors.The Journal of experimental biology · 2020Article
- Aerodynamics of manoeuvring flight in brown long-eared bats (Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2018Article
- Mechanical power curve measured in the wake of pied flycatchers indicates modulation of parasite power across flight speeds.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
How aerodynamic power required for animal flight varies with flight speed determines optimal speeds during foraging and migratory flight. Despite its relevance, aerodynamic power provides an elusive quantity to measure directly in animal flight. Here, we determine the aerodynamic power from wake velocity fields, measured using tomographical particle image velocimetry, of pied flycatchers flying freely in a wind tunnel. We find a shallow U-shaped power curve, which is flatter than expected by theory. Based on how the birds vary body angle with speed, we speculate that the shallow curve results from increased body drag coefficient and body frontal area at lower flight speeds. Including modulation of body drag in the model results in a more reasonable fit with data than the traditional model. From the wake structure, we also find a single starting vortex generated from the two wings during the downstroke across flight speeds (1-9 m s
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.