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Home Science News Biology

Turkey vultures fly faster to defy thin air

August 1, 2024
in Biology
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Turkey vultures fly faster to defy thin air
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Mountain hikes are invigorating. Crisp air and clear views can refresh the soul, but thin air presents an additional challenge for high-altitude birds. ‘All else being equal, bird wings produce less lift in low density air’, says Jonathan Rader from the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, USA, making it more difficult to remain aloft. Yet this doesn’t seem to put them off. Bar-headed geese, cranes and bar-tailed godwits have recorded altitude records of 6000 m and more. So how do they manage to take to the air when thin air offers little lift? One possibility was that birds at high altitude simply fly faster, to compensate for the lower air density, but it wasn’t clear whether birds that naturally inhabit a wide range of altitudes, from sea level to the loftiest summits, might fine-tune their flight speed to compensate for thin air. ‘Turkey vultures are common through North America and inhabit an elevation range of more than 3000 m’, says Rader, so he and Ty Hedrick (UNC-Chapel Hill) decided to find out whether turkey vultures (Cathartes aura) residing at different elevations fly at different speeds depending on their altitude. They publish their discovery in Journal of Experimental Biology that turkey vultures fly faster at altitude to compensate for the lack of lift caused by flying in thin air.

Mountain hikes are invigorating. Crisp air and clear views can refresh the soul, but thin air presents an additional challenge for high-altitude birds. ‘All else being equal, bird wings produce less lift in low density air’, says Jonathan Rader from the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, USA, making it more difficult to remain aloft. Yet this doesn’t seem to put them off. Bar-headed geese, cranes and bar-tailed godwits have recorded altitude records of 6000 m and more. So how do they manage to take to the air when thin air offers little lift? One possibility was that birds at high altitude simply fly faster, to compensate for the lower air density, but it wasn’t clear whether birds that naturally inhabit a wide range of altitudes, from sea level to the loftiest summits, might fine-tune their flight speed to compensate for thin air. ‘Turkey vultures are common through North America and inhabit an elevation range of more than 3000 m’, says Rader, so he and Ty Hedrick (UNC-Chapel Hill) decided to find out whether turkey vultures (Cathartes aura) residing at different elevations fly at different speeds depending on their altitude. They publish their discovery in Journal of Experimental Biology that turkey vultures fly faster at altitude to compensate for the lack of lift caused by flying in thin air.

First the duo needed to select locations over several thousand meters’ altitude, so they started filming the vultures flying at the local Orange County refuse site (80 m above sea level); ‘Vultures on a landfill… who would have guessed?’, chuckles Rader. Then they relocated to Rader’s home state of Wyoming, visiting Alcova (1600 m) before ending up at the University of Wyoming campus in Laramie (2200 m). At each location, the duo set up three synchronized cameras with a clear view to a tree that was home to a roosting colony of turkey vultures, ready to film the vultures’ flights in 3D as they flew home at the end of the day. ‘Wyoming is a famously windy place and prone to afternoon thunderstorms’, Rader explains, recalling being chased off the roof of the University of Wyoming Biological Sciences Building by storms and the wind blurring movies of the flying birds as it rattled the cameras.

Back in North Carolina, Rader reconstructed 2458 bird flights from the movies, calculating their flight speed before converting to airspeed, which ranged from 8.7 to 13.24m/s. He also calculated the air density at each location, based on local air pressure readings, recording a 27% change from 0.89kg/m3 at Laramie to 1.227 kg/m3 at Chapel Hill. After plotting the air densities at the time of flight against the birds’ airspeeds on a graph, Rader and Hedrick could see that the birds flying at 2200m in Laramie were generally flying ~1m/s faster than the birds in Chapel Hill. Turkey vultures fly faster at higher altitudes to remain aloft. But how do they achieve these higher airspeeds?

Rader returned to the flight movies, looking for the tell-tale up-and-down motion that would indicate when they were flapping. However, when he compared how much each bird was flapping with the different air densities, the high-altitude vultures were flapping no more than the birds nearer to sea level, so they weren’t changing their wingbeats to counteract the effects of low air density. Instead, it is likely that the 2200 m high birds were flying faster simply because there is less drag in thin air to slow them down, allowing the Laramie vultures to fly faster than the Chapel Hill birds to compensate for generating less lift in lower air density.

 

IF REPORTING THIS STORY, PLEASE MENTION JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL BIOLOGY AS THE SOURCE AND, IF REPORTING ONLINE, PLEASE CARRY A LINK TO:

REFERENCE: Rader, J. A. and Hedrick, T. L. (2024). Turkey vultures tune their airspeed to changing air density. J. Exp. Biol. 227, jeb246828. doi:10.1242/jeb.246828

DOI: 10.1242/jeb.246828

Registered journalists can obtain a copy of the article under embargo from Unregistered journalists can register at to access the embargoed content. The embargoed article can also be obtained from Kathryn Knight (kathryn.knight@biologists.com)

This article is posted on this site to give advance access to other authorised media who may wish to report on this story. Full attribution is required and if reporting online a link to is also required. The story posted here is COPYRIGHTED. Advance permission is required before any and every reproduction of each article in full from permissions@biologists.com.

THIS ARTICLE IS EMBARGOED UNTIL THURSDAY, 1 AUGUST 2024, 18:00 HRS EDT (23:00 HRS BST)

info for journalists ONLY: The embargoed text of the article and embargoed multimedia are available to registered journalists at . Unregistered journalists must register at to access the embargoed content. For other enquiries, please contact Kathryn Knight at kathryn.knight@biologists.com



Journal

Journal of Experimental Biology

DOI

10.1242/jeb.246828

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Turkey vultures tune their airspeed to changing air density

Article Publication Date

1-Aug-2024

COI Statement

N/A

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