Course day 3: Ecology of Animal Migration - Locomotion

The third day of the graduate student course on Ecology of Animal Migration covered the topic Locomotion. Three lectures were given by first Prof. Colin Pennycuick at Bristol University, and then Anders Hedenström and Florian Muijres from Lund. Colin Pennycuick in a brilliant lecture covered the topic on how to calculate flight ranges in birds and various other parameters important for bird flight using GPS tracks from three species of geese and some examples from long-distance migrating waders. Thereafter, Anders gave an insightful review of the wind tunnel work in Lund and Florian ended the morning with an elegant exersise in understanding Reynolds numbers by comparing different animal taxa. The Lund wind tunnel was demonstrated, including a flying bird, and thereafter the course participants dived into measuring the correct parameters of bird wings and bodies to be inserted in the CP "Flight 1.21 -program".

Flight 1.21 by Colin Pennycuick can be downloaded at this link: http://www.bio.bris.ac.uk/people/staff.cfm?key=95

Tomorrow there will be an excursion to Falsterbo Bird Observatory with research presentations by Nils Kjellén and Karin Persson. Back in Lund Karin Rengefors will give a lecture on dispersal in small organisms and therafter there will be a Poster Session/Pub in the Entrance Hall.

An exciting day!// Susanne

Special feature on Animal Flight

Dear CAnMovians!

The highly relevant journal Experiments in Fluids has just published a special feature issue on Animal Flight, which contains a multitude on cutting edge papers on animal flight. Among them are two papers from the CAnMove Flight Lab, one on analytical approaches for analyzing PIV(PIV = Particle Image Velocimetry) data and one on time resolved wakes from two species of bats flying in the wind tunnel (using our new high speed stereo PIV system). PIV has become a common approach of analyzing the aerodynamic "footprints" of flying animals, as the wake contains information about the magnitude and time-history of the aerodynamic forces generated by the flapping wings. The special feature also contains papers from other research groups, including other bats, hummingbirds, as well as more engineering oriented studies of heaving airfoils (but still of interest to the aerodynamics of animal flight). Experiments in Fluids focuses in new or improved methods of measuring flow properties, which captures the essence of research progress, i.e. the development of new techniques of observing or measuring nature, and is therefore a journal at the top of our list!