ReviewsOrganized flight in birds
Section snippets
The era of anecdote and speculation
Several ornithologists of the 1930s made field observations that would later be very provocative to experimentalists and theoreticians. Nichols (1931) noted that in turning and wheeling pigeon, Columba livia, flocks, the position of the birds at the head of a turning flock would be exchanged with birds at the side after the completion of a turn; there did not appear to be consistent ‘leadership’ in such flocks. He speculated that this behaviour might be the result of faster birds in the front
Line formations
Line-flying birds typically fly in staggered, or ‘echelon’, formations rather than in straight lines nose-to-tail. If two such formations are joined at an apex at the front of the formation, we have a V or a J, its asymmetric variant. Franzisket, 1951, von Holst, 1952 and Hochbaum (1955) suggested that close formation flight might provide the advantage of a turbulence-free zone behind a bird ahead, but that would seem to apply only if the birds flew immediately behind the bird in front, like
Cluster flocks
There is an extensive literature discussing the biological value of flocking in general (Krebs & Barnard 1980), but very few papers have appeared with specific reference to the highly organized turning and wheeling (‘cluster’) flocks of some small birds. The most commonly offered hypothesis is that the closely spaced cluster flocks offer protection against aerial predators such as hawks, presumably by increasing the risk of collision to the predator (Tinbergen 1953). Examples have been reported
Conclusions
Advances in the understanding of the function and mechanisms of organized flight have been strongly linked to the introduction of new techniques or technologies. Heppner (1997) identified several areas that might be expected to produce such advances, but a decade later, although it has been possible to refine and more closely define these needs, much still needs to be done.
(1) Three-dimensional simulations. Some of the existing simulations (Vicsek et al., 1995, Lebar Bajec et al., 2005, Moškon
Acknowledgments
We sincerely thank Maja Lebar Bajec, Michael Byrne, Andrea Cavagna, Marjorie Heppner, Jim Kennedy, Craig Reynolds and Timothy Williams for reading the manuscript. This work was funded in part by the Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS) through the Pervasive Computing research programme (P2-0395).
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F. H. Heppner is at the Department of Biological Sciences, University of Rhode Island, 102 Morrill Hall, Kingston, RI 02881-0816, U.S.A.