How are the Birds control their flight?

Pierre Legagneux from the University of Quebec and Simon Ducatez of McGill University in Montreal ever conducted the joint research in France in 2006. After working in the laboratory, they drove home together toward their boarding house in one city in France.

When birds fly away from your car, they're not reacting to your speed but rather the posted speed limit. (Picture from: http://globalnews.ca/)

Almost every day they watched the birds controlling their flight speed. On the road with a 50 kilometers per hour speed limit, these animals rush to fly to avoid the passing car since about 15 meters before.

While on the road that has a speed limit of 110 kilometers per hour, the bird anticipating collided with the car was nearer 75 meters. These animals do equally well when faced with a fast car on the slow road.

Opposite is the case, when they dealing with a slow car at the fast road. "Interestingly, the birds did not respond to the car's speed, but the road's speed limit," said Legagneux. "They seemed to be able to read the road markings".

As quoted from Newscientist, these two biologists explain that the birds treat the car as a predator, so tend to avoid it as much as possible. They also found that the bird's take off distance varies according to the season. Birds tend to let a car approaching in the spring, and behave more cautious in the fall.

According Legagneux and Ducatez, this behavior arises because the birds are more active in the spring, such as feeding their children. It could also be because the juvenile birds first learned about the roads in the spring, so it has a bit of experience with cars.

Birds are known to adapt, said Pierre Legagneux, a behavioural ecologist at the University of Quebec in Rimouski. Urban birds adjust their song frequencies to account for noise pollution and they tolerate closer contact with humans compared to their rural cousins.

"Birds are able to associate the environment, such as forests or roads, with potential risks," said Christopher Lepczyk, an ornithologist at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, responded to this study. He thinks the work could prompt follow-up studies comparing birds in urban and rural areas, and perhaps encourage more innovative methods. "I just think it's really cool," he says. "We don't do enough of this kind of work." *** [EKA | FROM VARIOUS SOURCES | NEWSCIENTIST | MAHARDIKA SATRIA HADI | KORAN TEMPO 4320]

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