Mystery Behind Birds Flying In a V

Formation Revealed

A new study published in the journal Nature and led

by researchers from Royal Veterinary College in the

UK, finds that the migrating birds carefully position

their wingtips and sync their flapping, apparently to

hook the former bird’s updraft—and save energy during

flight.

Scientists concluded after tracking a group of large black

birds, the northern ibises—each equipped with ultralight

sensors with a tiny GPS device—that had been

trained to follow an ultralight aircraft.

The surprising fact is that the birds know how this

formation contributes to the flock as a whole. Bird

formations, called echelons, come in many

arrangements. According to Scientific American, the “J”

formation is actually more common than the “V”

formation, but the V is probably the most commonly

noticeable.

According to a 2001 report on bird formations, the

birds fly in a V actually to conserve energy.

“From a behavioral perspective it’s really a

breakthrough,” says David Lentink, a mechanical

engineer at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California,

who was not a part of the study. “Showing that birds

care about syncing their wing beats is definitely an

important insight that we didn’t have before.”

Ty Hedrick said “It’s a pretty impressive piece of work as

it is, but it does suggest that there’s a lot more to learn.”

Ty Hedrick, is a biologist at the University of North

Carolina, Chapel Hill, who studies flight aerodynamics in

birds and insects.

It was believed that birds doesn’t possess such precise

engineering quality. The scientists suspected that

whether they contain the skill to process the flight

dynamics and sensory feedback required to implement

these proficient formations.

A seven-minute analysis showed how perfectly the ibises

positioned themselves while flying in a V, so as to exploit

the updraft in another bird’s wake, letting them conserve

their energy.

They additionally appeared to time the flapping of their

wings to take full advantage of that updraft, by creating a

wingtip path, an equivalent wave track through the air as

the wingtip of the bird up ahead.

And once one bird flew directly behind another instead,

it gave the impression to regulate its fluttering to scale

back the effects of the wake’s downdraft. Thus birds will

either sense or predict the wake left by their flock mates

and regulate their fluttering consequently, a

noteworthy ability, the researchers said.