I think I read something about some birds being able to sleep with only one hemisphere of their brain at a time, similar to dolphins. The common swift often spends months at a time without touching ground.
And lots of birds perform marvelous feats of long-range navigation, storks, for example, travel thousands of kilometers each year to return to their nest for breeding.
I would suppose that they don’t “know” they just feel compelled.
There are dragon flies that migrate from India to Africa. It takes three generations to complete the round trip. So how do they know? It must be just a feeling.
I guess that a long time ago when India and Aftrica were adjacent parts of Gondwana land, the migration must have been quite short. But as the continents drifted apart the dragoon flies had to adapt to the longer route.
The bird's average speed is 33 mph (29 knots). Cargo vessels tend to cruise at about 18-25 knots, and many move more slowly.
There's little direct traffic between Alaska and Australia. Shipping lines are visible through their emissions trails, as in this Nullschool link showing NO2 concentrations, from May of this year. The long lines are shipping lanes. You'll note these from Panama to New Zealand, tracking along the Western US coast and Alaska along the Great Circle route to Japan and China, and past Papua New Guinea, among other notable routes:
The data recorders would also likely note any marked variations in travel speed or direction. Again, ships tend not to cover the routes flown by Godwits.
The tracking device is solar powered so presumably can get away with a very small battery. They mention in the article that it goes offline at times while the bird is resting because it can be covered by feathers which prevent it from getting enough sunlight.
That said, as if it wasn't impressive enough that Godwits can fly over 8000 miles non-stop, it's even more amazing that they can do it while burdened with a tracking device!
>The transmission technology will continue to be of great importance, as sensors weighing five grams are still too heavy for many animal species: 70 percent of bird species and 65 percent of mammal species, not to mention amphibians or insects, cannot be equipped with sensors using the current technology. The next generation of Icarus sensors will therefore weigh just one gram.
And the really bonkers thing about many birds is that the single gram will still be a sizeable fraction of their total body weight. Chickadees and nuthatches (and other birds of that size) weigh somewhere between 10 and 15 grams, usually. Zebra finches are about the same. It'll be a really long time before we can put sensors on those!
4 Kg is only about 5% of the weight of an average adult male. Now imagine that weight tied to different places on your body. On your back it might not be a big issue, but glued to the tip of one finger or maybe tied to one of your toes it could effectively disable or immobilize you.
The weight isn't the whole story, it's how it is placed that matters as well.
Article mentions a solar panel on the tracker, which seems positioned to receive charge when the bird is on the wing, because when the bird landed it’s feathers covered it up.
> Since landing in New South Wales, 4BBRW’s tracker has intermittently gone offline, which is common as birds rest because their feathers can cover the solar charging panel.
So surprising you can run a GPS on a solar panel of about 1cm2 (my estimate), see picture in article
Not much, but the design of these things is incredible. I spent 20 years managing the operations for the ground processing of this data in North America. We worked closely with the transmitter manufacturers to certify them for use with the system (https://www.argos-system.org).
Microwave Telemetry builds the smallest ones: https://www.microwavetelemetry.com/solar_ptts The design and manufacture of these devices is incredible. The guy behind the company is an incredible engineer (and a nice guy)!
could be, but it seems the correction signal only kicks in once there is a threshold discrepancy. I guess studying many such tracks could give some hints and correlated with what is known about the physiology of how these birds orient.
Hehe, good point. But for me 'land' means soil, though I'll take landing on an ice floe or the North Pole as land for the purposes of this discussion. I'm not sure how far North/South the Albatros' habitat extends, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if they went there too.
they sleep during flight, I think some/many fish/birds can switch off parts of brain to be esentially sleeping while autopilot works, sharks for instance, I guess for lowly humans closest comparison would be sleep walking
> “They feed in the air, they mate in the air, they get nest material in the air,” [0]
> "They can land on nest boxes, branches, or houses, but they can’t really land on the ground.” That's because their wings are too long and their legs are too short to take off from a flat surface.
It may be the longest distance recorded for a continual flight by any land bird, but it's not an extraordinary performance.
For instance, common swifts can flight continuously for months. They obviously accumulate a huge distance during this time, even when they're not migrating. They live in Eurasia, from Lisbon to Vladivostok. And they winter in Africa, south of Congo. I think Vladivostok-Harare is a longer trip than Alaska-Australia, but it's probably hard to put sensors on small birds during their migration.
Came here to say something similar. Common swifts are amazing. Quoting Wikipedia:
> Except when nesting, swifts spend their lives in the air, living on the insects caught in flight; they drink, feed, and often mate and sleep on the wing. Some individuals go 10 months without landing. No other bird spends as much of its life in flight. Contrary to common belief, swifts can take flight from level ground. Their maximum horizontal flying speed is 111.6 km/h. Over a lifetime they can cover millions of kilometers.
I'm guessing it's being called extraordinary, because the godwits are flapping continually rather than gliding to take a break, from article:
Unlike albatross or other long-flying seabirds, godwits are active flyers, not gliders—their wings are moving the whole time. “It just beggars belief, really,” Riegen says. “I mean, though I've known that for decades now, I still find it hard to imagine how anything can keep up that sort of effort 24-hours a day, without taking a break.”
As a human being, I find these feats of navigation and stamina astounding.
Human beings cannot do anything like this.
These birds are awesome.
Still, I find it peculiar and somehow off the mark to contextualise one bird's flight as a "world record".
In the bird's world, these are ordinary events. The only standout feature of that flight is that no human had witnessed and recorded anything more superlative.
It's OK that humans enjoy measuring things and celebrating the longest X or the biggest Y or the fastest Z. As I human, I get that.
What's less OK, and somewhat diminishing of the bird's natural majesty, is that if another bird were to fly 2% slower or less far, humans might shrug their shoulders and ask, so what?
They aren't though, unless you start adding specifically tailored constraints like the run should happen in a very hot place.
A trained horse can cover 100+ miles per day with a rider, a husky can run 100+ miles in a sledge, and they will probably outpace humans. Not to mention that only a tiny fraction of humans can even finish a marathon, which is no big deal for most wolves or horses.
And camels and maybe ostriches will probably outrun us in hot climate as well (but that I didn't check).
However, horses are uniquely good at endurance because they have sweat glands all over their body, just like primates do. (And that's of course one of the reasons we domesticated them.) Almost all other mammals fare much worse.
Our ancestors would jog for hours to chase down prey. The prey had to stop to pant to cool down which it couldn't do while running. I don't know how long it would have taken but at least a few hours seems like a reasonable assumption to wear down the animal prey. Although I don't think even our ancestors could jog for 239 hours straight.
To be fair, though, horses are uniquely good at endurance compared to almost all other non-primate mammals. They have sweat glands all over their body just like humans do.
what about dogs? They can cover nearly 1,000 miles of rough winter terrain in under 2 weeks, as seen in the iditarod. Or if we're looking at long distance travel in hot environments what about camels? I think this "humans can run down any animal with our endurance" stuff is vastly overblown. We're above average, but hardly the best on earth.
A human can run down any animal on earth because we're smart, not just because we have amazing endurance.
Animals don't realize that if they just ran 10 miles away they would escape easily. They'll just run far enough away that they can't really see us anymore. Then we find them and chase them again. Eventually they get tired because they sprint away and we conserve our energy.
A horse may be physically capable of running farther than a human, but actually getting them to do that is another thing.
I don't recall the title, but I remember a documentary where an African tribe member would slow jog after an animal for about 24 hours before the animal would get exhausted, so a few hours seems on the lower end of the jogging requirements for our ancestors, but am happy to be proven wrong
Humans can effectively run forever if it weren't for needing sleep, or eventually, needing to replace fat stores.
> Previous estimates, when accounting for glycogen depletion, suggest that a human could run at about a 10 minute per mile pace, which allows existing fat stores to be converted to glycogen, forever. The only limit to our eventual mileage, therefore, is our need for sleep.
https://nikomccarty.medium.com/how-far-can-humans-run-d5c97f...
There are regularly 24 hour races and I've done a few myself. 100 miles in 24 hours isn't that hard. The record was just recently set at 192.25 miles (309.4 km):
There are also 48 hr and 7 day races. Sleep is necessary somewhere between those two points, though two guys just went 85 hours with basically no sleep:
That's a race where every hour on the hour you have to complete 4.166 miles. You get as much rest as the balance of your time after you complete a lap till the next hour begins. Most competitors complete a lap in around 48-52 minutes. The race continues until there is only one runner left to complete a lap.
There's Cliff Young's win in the 875km Westfield Sydney to Melbourne Ultramarathon.
> While the other competitors stopped to sleep for six hours, Young kept running. He ran continuously for five days, taking the lead during the first night and eventually winning by 10 hours
To be the nitpick: You have been flown that far in a day. On a species-level perhaps an equally impressive feat, but on an individual level I’m more impressed by the birdie..
If we're going to do accounting on an individual level then a tiny fraction of individuals are responsible for flying everyone else (and their luggage and their mail and...) which is super impressive again.
The most comparable feat of navigation and stamina that humans can do is sailing around the world alone. Some sailors will sleep for no more than 20 minutes at a time scattered throughout the day.
About the closest thing I can think of are the Polynesian canoeists who first crossed the vast distances of the Pacific to reach isolated island chains and they must have done that more than once too.
Those guys were some very special people if you ask me.
they are just switching between parts of brain, essentially running autopilot, sharks do same, soe it's not really THAT impressive for bird to stay in flight for extended periods, 10 days is nothing spectacular
Tangent: monarch butterflies routinely fly across the Atlantic Ocean, which (given their relatively tiny size and fragility) strikes me as an equivalent feat.
I'm constantly astonished by birds. They seem to be the ultimate evolutionary optimisers, which makes sense given their requirements. They seem to be incredibly efficeient with energy, weight and space.
It's not just physical feats like this, but the way some of the the corvids pack incredible brains in a volume and mass significantly less than other non-flying animals with roughly similar levels of intellegence (although I appreciate that cross-species intelligence comparisons are always difficult).
And these are the evolutionary traits that won. It's incredible to me to imagine all the configurations of different traits nature threw at this problem and all the sentience that was lost in the process.
It's things like this that remind you that birds evolved from dinosaurs (in fact, recently birds have been described as just a kind of dinosaur, the only kind to survive the asteroid impact).
Evolution isn’t “one and done”, so really most animals that survived today are the current ultimate version of themselves. Some animals are in the middle of evolutionary leaps, and some individuals might have “bad” versions of certain genes are a result.
How does the tracking work? So the birds are carrying a GPS chip? How is the location transmitted back to the researchers? - they are over the pacific for most of the flight
Not GPS - the locations are derived from measuring doppler shift over a handful of messages. If you know where the spacecraft is, you can derive the location of the transmitter. On a good day you can get 100-400m accuracy. Not close to GPS, but good enough for tracking animals. I managed the North American data center for www.argos-system.org for many years.
Yes it carries a GPS receiver and transmits to a satellite periodically. Most of the time, most of the tracker package is turned off. It only weighs 5 grams.
Amazing that our state of the art technology is a fragile device that can fly for 30 minutes, while this ancient entity can fly nonstop, deriving energy from bugs and water, fly through storms, self repair any damage, has global navigation and local avoidance, and even can self replicate.
It's humbling to realize how far off our technology is in certain areas from competing even with insects.
Yes, and then they had to replace the batteries that suffered “irreversible damage” and that took several months to fix. These birds just keep on going.
Unless they hit one of our earlier attempts to survive long enough to be as good as birds. I hope new wind farms are built with awareness of bird migration in mind.
I'd go a step further and say that technology is nature. Humans just represent another way for nature to enhance the permutation of new possibilities. For thousands of years, we acted like the animal analogue to the fungal mattes that had terraformed the continental landmasses to become livable by plants hundreds of millions of years ago.
Everywhere we went, we planted intricately organised forests of different plant species that then aided an enhanced biodiversity of the fauna too. It's only recently in our history that humans have turned from a proliferator of biodiversity to a poison for it.
Humans have always been a disaster for the environment they move into. We drove mammoths to extinction over 10,000 years ago. Australia used to have large numbers of megafauna species which the aborigines killed off tens of thousands of years ago. Humans would use fire to burn their prey out of hiding (and destroying their habitat in the process), then just move off to the next habitat once everything was burned up.
Humans being a destructive force to the ecosystems we depend on is definitely not a new thing.
Our propensity to blame past extinctions on humans often has more to do with projecting our own civilisation's tendancies at destruction than some immutable fact about human nature.
Mammoths also tended to live in areas of relatively low biodiversity such as the artic and tundra anyway so this does not contradict my point that historically humans have caused increases in the biodiversity in their local ecologies.
Well we are destroying nature. And don't forget the whole "sustainable agriculture" movement, and recent attentions brought to how plowing degrades soil, etc.
(Just responding to your point; not claiming the parent is right or wrong.)
The horse or cow was not put there to plow our fields. We just figured out a way to get them to do that, until we developed enough to figure out ways to build more efficient methods.
I am so glad to hear this statement from someone else. You put into words a feeling that I have have struggled to express properly.
A lot of folks look at the narrow window of time of their life as evidence for very broad-sweeping claims and frankly, I find that to be very arrogant, short-sighted, and frightening. A lot of people with this kind of mindset are now in high-power positions and making decisions that we have yet to see the repercussions for, with the short-term results they can show as evidence of their success and no concern for the long-terms effects.
Though to be fair to technology, it's amazing how it can track a bird 8000 miles on just solar power, giving us a view of the world no other bird will ever really have at the moment.
Everything we build is an attempt to replicate what already exist in nature. How close we come is a function of our expertise and understanding of the laws of life. As we understand these things better, we'll be able to build objects that closely match what's in nature.
Nature is the most advanced technology there is. This is why it's such a shame that climate change leads to destroyed habitats and lost species. We'll never know what ingenious solutions nature cooked up in some obscure extinct species.
Probably gradual optimizations in flying from Alaska, thru the Aleutian islands, to Kamchatka Russia, to Japan, to Korea, to China, to Taiwan, to the Philippines, to Indonesia, to Australia.
In fact, going directly over the Pacific is only maybe ~30% shorter.
Animal equivalent of ultramarathons. Only difference between animals and human athletes being that animals are doing it on daily basis without trying to beat records or win something.
Lots of people trying to compare our 10k-year old technology (200 years if we talk about machines, even less if we talk about robots) with something that evolved basically with billions of trial/errors in millions of years.
At this point we should check which animal can travel as fast as a shuttle and go back and forth to the moon.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 235 ms ] threadDon’t they need sleep?
How do they know to start on the exact same day every year? Fly to the exact same place?
I am a bit jealous of the scientists who get to work with such amazing creatures :)
And lots of birds perform marvelous feats of long-range navigation, storks, for example, travel thousands of kilometers each year to return to their nest for breeding.
They are amazing creatures.
There are dragon flies that migrate from India to Africa. It takes three generations to complete the round trip. So how do they know? It must be just a feeling.
I guess that a long time ago when India and Aftrica were adjacent parts of Gondwana land, the migration must have been quite short. But as the continents drifted apart the dragoon flies had to adapt to the longer route.
Next time I'll send through a pigeon.
The bird's average speed is 33 mph (29 knots). Cargo vessels tend to cruise at about 18-25 knots, and many move more slowly.
There's little direct traffic between Alaska and Australia. Shipping lines are visible through their emissions trails, as in this Nullschool link showing NO2 concentrations, from May of this year. The long lines are shipping lanes. You'll note these from Panama to New Zealand, tracking along the Western US coast and Alaska along the Great Circle route to Japan and China, and past Papua New Guinea, among other notable routes:
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2021/05/01/1300Z/chem/surface/...
The data recorders would also likely note any marked variations in travel speed or direction. Again, ships tend not to cover the routes flown by Godwits.
The article mentions that is solar-powered, but even then how much power could it generate?
That said, as if it wasn't impressive enough that Godwits can fly over 8000 miles non-stop, it's even more amazing that they can do it while burdened with a tracking device!
>The transmission technology will continue to be of great importance, as sensors weighing five grams are still too heavy for many animal species: 70 percent of bird species and 65 percent of mammal species, not to mention amphibians or insects, cannot be equipped with sensors using the current technology. The next generation of Icarus sensors will therefore weigh just one gram.
This is just amazing
The weight isn't the whole story, it's how it is placed that matters as well.
So surprising you can run a GPS on a solar panel of about 1cm2 (my estimate), see picture in article
Microwave Telemetry builds the smallest ones: https://www.microwavetelemetry.com/solar_ptts The design and manufacture of these devices is incredible. The guy behind the company is an incredible engineer (and a nice guy)!
Nature's benchmarks for economy of resources are still so very far ahead from anything human made
What do they mean by land bird?
> “They feed in the air, they mate in the air, they get nest material in the air,” [0]
> "They can land on nest boxes, branches, or houses, but they can’t really land on the ground.” That's because their wings are too long and their legs are too short to take off from a flat surface.
[0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/swift-bir...
For instance, common swifts can flight continuously for months. They obviously accumulate a huge distance during this time, even when they're not migrating. They live in Eurasia, from Lisbon to Vladivostok. And they winter in Africa, south of Congo. I think Vladivostok-Harare is a longer trip than Alaska-Australia, but it's probably hard to put sensors on small birds during their migration.
> Except when nesting, swifts spend their lives in the air, living on the insects caught in flight; they drink, feed, and often mate and sleep on the wing. Some individuals go 10 months without landing. No other bird spends as much of its life in flight. Contrary to common belief, swifts can take flight from level ground. Their maximum horizontal flying speed is 111.6 km/h. Over a lifetime they can cover millions of kilometers.
Unlike albatross or other long-flying seabirds, godwits are active flyers, not gliders—their wings are moving the whole time. “It just beggars belief, really,” Riegen says. “I mean, though I've known that for decades now, I still find it hard to imagine how anything can keep up that sort of effort 24-hours a day, without taking a break.”
Still I wouldn’t have known about either without the HN-posted article.
Human beings cannot do anything like this.
These birds are awesome.
Still, I find it peculiar and somehow off the mark to contextualise one bird's flight as a "world record".
In the bird's world, these are ordinary events. The only standout feature of that flight is that no human had witnessed and recorded anything more superlative.
It's OK that humans enjoy measuring things and celebrating the longest X or the biggest Y or the fastest Z. As I human, I get that.
What's less OK, and somewhat diminishing of the bird's natural majesty, is that if another bird were to fly 2% slower or less far, humans might shrug their shoulders and ask, so what?
A trained horse can cover 100+ miles per day with a rider, a husky can run 100+ miles in a sledge, and they will probably outpace humans. Not to mention that only a tiny fraction of humans can even finish a marathon, which is no big deal for most wolves or horses.
And camels and maybe ostriches will probably outrun us in hot climate as well (but that I didn't check).
Depends on the time constraints - I think a large percentage people can finish a marathon within 12 hours, even more if you allow up to 16 hours.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/24-hour_run
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_running_hypothesis
Humans vs horses: https://slate.com/culture/2012/06/long-distance-running-and-...
Cheetahs, wolves : https://www.businessinsider.com/how-humans-evolved-to-be-bes...
We're really good at running.
Animals don't realize that if they just ran 10 miles away they would escape easily. They'll just run far enough away that they can't really see us anymore. Then we find them and chase them again. Eventually they get tired because they sprint away and we conserve our energy.
A horse may be physically capable of running farther than a human, but actually getting them to do that is another thing.
> Previous estimates, when accounting for glycogen depletion, suggest that a human could run at about a 10 minute per mile pace, which allows existing fat stores to be converted to glycogen, forever. The only limit to our eventual mileage, therefore, is our need for sleep. https://nikomccarty.medium.com/how-far-can-humans-run-d5c97f...
https://www.runnersworld.com/news/a37465691/sania-sorokin-24...
There are also 48 hr and 7 day races. Sleep is necessary somewhere between those two points, though two guys just went 85 hours with basically no sleep:
https://www.bigsbackyardultra.com/
That's a race where every hour on the hour you have to complete 4.166 miles. You get as much rest as the balance of your time after you complete a lap till the next hour begins. Most competitors complete a lap in around 48-52 minutes. The race continues until there is only one runner left to complete a lap.
https://www.farmprogress.com/blog/cliff-young-farmer-who-out...
> While the other competitors stopped to sleep for six hours, Young kept running. He ran continuously for five days, taking the lead during the first night and eventually winning by 10 hours
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Young_(athlete)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6289283-born-to-run
We're quite good when trained, but the average diet/lifestyle doesn't allow us to come anywhere close to our potential
Well, I've flown that far in a day, carrying a couple of suitcases, but it took that bird a week and a half with no luggage.
To be the nitpick: You have been flown that far in a day. On a species-level perhaps an equally impressive feat, but on an individual level I’m more impressed by the birdie..
Yes, and birds are lousy coders. We all have our strengths.
The most comparable feat of navigation and stamina that humans can do is sailing around the world alone. Some sailors will sleep for no more than 20 minutes at a time scattered throughout the day.
About the closest thing I can think of are the Polynesian canoeists who first crossed the vast distances of the Pacific to reach isolated island chains and they must have done that more than once too.
Those guys were some very special people if you ask me.
Pretty cool stuff! Have to wonder when this evolved, and whether it could be mimicked.
0: https://www.audubon.org/news/scientists-finally-have-evidenc...
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unihemispheric_slow-wave_sle...
Nothing scientific here, just a casual comment.
I know this isn't an insightful comment, but
wtf
It's not just physical feats like this, but the way some of the the corvids pack incredible brains in a volume and mass significantly less than other non-flying animals with roughly similar levels of intellegence (although I appreciate that cross-species intelligence comparisons are always difficult).
The big heavy dinos didn't have that. Nor did the Neanderthals.
The problem with efficiency is that when you have more than enough resources, you get obese very quickly. Like chickens and modern humans. :)
> males weigh 190–400 g (6.7–14.1 oz), while females weigh 260–630 g (9.2–22.2 oz);
quite efficient, sentient automaton. on the other hand the tracker we built keeps going offline because it needs constant recharging :-)
It's humbling to realize how far off our technology is in certain areas from competing even with insects.
P.S. This aircraft flew from Japan to Hawaii in 118 hours solely powered by solar energy https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/solar-impulse-2-br...
(n.b. this isn't to dispute the awesomeness of birds.)
https://www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/threats-to-birds/...
Your point being?
Of course our technology is going to lose, it’s nowhere near as mature as nature’s.
Everywhere we went, we planted intricately organised forests of different plant species that then aided an enhanced biodiversity of the fauna too. It's only recently in our history that humans have turned from a proliferator of biodiversity to a poison for it.
Humans being a destructive force to the ecosystems we depend on is definitely not a new thing.
However this cannot be said for the megafauna in Australia: https://theconversation.com/aboriginal-australians-co-existe...
Our propensity to blame past extinctions on humans often has more to do with projecting our own civilisation's tendancies at destruction than some immutable fact about human nature.
Mammoths also tended to live in areas of relatively low biodiversity such as the artic and tundra anyway so this does not contradict my point that historically humans have caused increases in the biodiversity in their local ecologies.
There is substantial evidence that the Amazon rainforest for instance was at least in part cultivated: https://www.voanews.com/a/amazon-rainforest-ancient-people-c...
(Just responding to your point; not claiming the parent is right or wrong.)
The plough turns out to mine the soil, not augment it.
https://www.npr.org/2021/02/24/967376880/new-evidence-shows-...
A lot of folks look at the narrow window of time of their life as evidence for very broad-sweeping claims and frankly, I find that to be very arrogant, short-sighted, and frightening. A lot of people with this kind of mindset are now in high-power positions and making decisions that we have yet to see the repercussions for, with the short-term results they can show as evidence of their success and no concern for the long-terms effects.
In fact, going directly over the Pacific is only maybe ~30% shorter.
At this point we should check which animal can travel as fast as a shuttle and go back and forth to the moon.
Albion H. Bowers was the Chief Scientist at NASA's Neil A. Armstrong Flight Research Center published some fantastic research:
On Wings of the Minimum Induced Drag: Spanload Implications for Aircraft and Birds
(https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20160003578)
but here are some videos that get the message across:
2014:
NASA's Albion H. Bowers - "Why Birds Don't Have Vertical Tails" - AMA EXPO 2014 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoT2upDbdUg)
2018:
"Prandtl Wing Minimum Drag Update" - Al Bowers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCwtcDNB15E)
2021:
Fly with Birds: Meeting with Albion H. Bowers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6oVXPkTnss)
We could massively improve our efficiency by adopting this. Its a shame that we are flying as much as we do and using so much unnecessary fuel.