Bird with GPS flies into typhoon | Hacker News Reader

Bird with GPS flies into typhoon

newatlas.com

234 pointsclumsysmurf106 comments

>All the while, the bird was zipping along at 90-170 km/h (56-106 mph). Given that these birds generally cruise at 10-60 km/h (6-37 mph), at his top speed

I assume the higher speed is "across the ground" but it's possible he flew his usual airspeed the whole time.

Yeah. I imagine it is like a ballon that blows away with the wind. To it, there is no wind. Just the ground is moving away below it.

but wouldn't the wind exert some pressure on the back of the bird? wouldn't it not generate any lift otherwise and just drop back to the ground? like sails on a sailboat, for the sailors it feels like there is no wind, but the sails are carrying massive pressure

The comparison with the balloon is perhaps not entirely accurate since birds like you say, fly using lift from the wings. So they need to have some relative speed vs the air.

The point is that as long as the entire body of air the bird is flying through is moving uniformly and without acceleration, it's perceptually indistinguishable from calm air (except visually, and even that only when flying pretty low).

For rotating and turbulent air, which would both not be totally unheard of in a hurricane, this probably doesn't apply though.

This is probably like when you swim out at the beach, and back and find you are 20m away from where you started due to currents. But you didn’t feel it.

With dead reckoning you could probably figure out.

You can’t feel linear/unaccelerated motion, and biological organisms aren’t great at indirectly deriving it from acceleration and rotation over time the way inertial navigation systems do.

Hell, even those have a hard time doing it without experiencing drift! So they periodically re-establish a baseline using something like GPS.

It doesn't really matter in this case, but hummingbirds would like to have a word with you.

A sailboat uses the speed difference between the water (basically stationary) and the wind. A bird (or sailplane) just moves along with the wind. Birds and sailplanes can however hang around areas of rising air to overcome their natural sink rate.

When you're flying, wind is no longer the air moving over the ground, it's the ground moving under the air. It doesn't produce acceleration except for a brief moment when you leave the ground.

If you’re in a boat in a river, your “natural” speed is the speed of the river. Same with air.

You point about a sailboat and wind is confused; the pressure comes from the fact that the boat is traveling at one speed through the water and at a different speed through the air.

ok, if the bird's natural speed is that of the ambient air, then how does it stay up? the bird is not lighter than air, so where does the upwards pressure on the bird come from? either the bird must flap its wings to stay up or there must be speed difference between the bird and the ambient air to generate lift.

If the bird’s natural speed is 7mph, and the tail wind is 7mph, the bird is still flying at 7mph airspeed, its ground speed just increases to 14mph.

No different than a jet flying with or against the jet stream.

https://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/flight/modern/ai...

that is my point - in order to stay up, the bird would need to either flap its wings for 700 miles non-stop (unlikely) in order to maintain velocity difference between it and the ambient air OR glide which basically means he was not traveling at the speed of ambient air, otherwise there would be no lift pressure generated on his wings and he would drop to the ground

Ignore the storm for a moment, and ask whether a bird can fly for 7h+, either from flapping, gliding, or navigating updrafts. The answer is yes, that's trivial for many many bird species, especially those with a propensity for ocean travel. The storm then just changes the baseline ground speed.

There's stuff like dynamic soaring that Albatrosses use to travel thousands of miles over the ocean using little energy.

Some enthusiasts use this to make RC gliders go really fast, and the record is over 500 mph.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_soaring

There is a speed difference between birds and the ambient air. Birds don't just drift aimlessly with the wind, they flap their wings and gain airspeed. But from their perspective, the "speed" at which they're flying is entirely relative to the mass of air, and not the ground.

This isn't some mystery, it's the same way boats and planes work. Consider a plane flying at 100 knots of airspeed. If the mass of air they're in is moving perpendicular to the plane at 50 knots, the plane will track diagonally across the ground even though it's pointed forward. The plane won't experience side loads because it's tracking 50 units sideways (with respect to the ground) for every 100 units it moves forwards, the exact same as the "wind". If the plane is instead in a 100 knot headwind, it will be stationary with respect to the ground. It won't drop out of the air, but it also won't make headway to its destination either.

From a mechanics perspective, neither the plane nor the bird care about what the ground is doing once they're airborne. The only thing they care about is the mass of air they're aloft in.

If your stall speed is 6mph and the winds are 100mph, you can fly into the wind at just above stall speed and still be doing 94mph tailfeathers-first.

>for the sailors it feels like there is no wind, but the sails are carrying massive pressure

The only way this is possible is if the sails are moving at a different airspeed than the sailors, which is only possible if 1) the sailor is running up and down the deck or 2) there is an windspeed gradient with altitude, which the sails penetrate by virtue of being tall.

The thing about storms is that the wind changes abruptly all the time. Maybe the bird knows how to navigate it, but it's not a safe environment for balloons like people used as example downthread.

Where the bird was flying the wind did not change abruptly all the time, that only happens in the turbulent lower atmosphere. Higher up the wind is more constant, in the case of a hurricane/typhoon in a constant vortex. The bird was caught in something resembling a local jet stream, circling around the storm's centre while being carried along.

What’s the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow in a hurricane?

Japanese one?

Aaaand hop, you go into the canyon! ;-)

Unless you can tell me your favorite color!

It would be yes because ground speed is what a GPS measures

> the bird resumed normal transmission and no doubt had some explaining to do when he returned to his flock over the water near the nesting island.

as a dad joke appreciator, i love whoever wrote this

Incredible that it never lost its bearings.

To me, that is WAY more impressive (so is the 4700m altitude!). The bird got completely tossed around for hours in extremely high winds and then still navigated back to it's breeding ground.

That's some amazing navigation skill.

> The bird got completely tossed around for hours in extremely high winds and then still navigated back to it's breeding ground.

And I got lost on one of the simplest hiking trails in a neighboring town last week. I tried to go off-path to circumvent a fallen tree. After about 15 minutes of thinking that I was just steps from reaching my destination, I ended up back at my starting point! I'm ashamed.

I believe this is how humanity will die. Internal TomTom degradation!!!

I don't know about this specific bird, but many birds have what are essentially biological compasses built into them.

Not sure why this was flagged dead. It's a fact that some birds are sensitive to magnetic fields [1]:

> They do this with the help of the magnetically sensitive proteins in their eyes and the magneto-receptive cells in the vestibular nucleus in their brain.

[1] https://phys.org/news/2022-02-compass-birds-ways-foreign.htm....

Allegedly, dogs too. Unclear how but they align north-south when pooping if they get the chance.

Yes, but that by itself does not help all that much?

I give you a compass and an 11 hour ride on a typhoon. The compass won't give you magical ability to return to your starting spot.

The compass allows me to track in which direction I'm roughly blown. Not on the scale of seconds, but hours. As soon as I escape the typhoon, I can start going back.

You're forgetting that it had GPS!

I liked this too, but it made me a little sad that the little bird would never be able to tell his bird friends what a crazy adventure he went on.

It could very well have had a fair amount of company from companion non-GPS-tagged birds (indeed seems a bit more likely?).

We never know what's in bird songs...

I wonder if you (the bird) get hypoxia or altitude sickness and experience the whole thing as a sort of gliding blur

I guess they always have the choice of turning around and increasing the pressure hitting their beak?

What’s the temperature like up there though? I guess it’s different during this kind of storm than usual?

Internet says temperature drop 2C per 1000’

> Internet says temperature drop 2C per 1000’

The Dry Adiabatic Lapse Rate: one of only two things I retained from a Meteorology class decades ago :-)

And the other fantastically unforgettable fact?

The saturated adiabatic lapse rate! When they meet it's happy land^W^W the cloud base

There are 27 species of clouds. My favorite will always be cirrus spissatus cumulonimbogenitus (google helped me remember how to spell it!).

Now I won't be able to forget that either. Clouds have species? I thought they were random. Until today.

Bird lungs work very differently from mammals. They have air sacs in front of and behind the lungs that take up a significant portion of their body cavity. The lungs themselves don't expand or compress. Air moves unidirectionally through the lungs both during inhalation and exhalation so there is no time at which the lungs themselves are not operating optimally. It is a two-phase system... during inhalation the posterior air sac fills with fresh air as spent air accumulates in the anterior air sac. The effective blood gas exchange surface area is about double that of mammals as well.

Basically: bird lungs are "pipelined" and highly optimized to extract oxygen even at altitude.

A reminder of just how far back in genetic history birds and mammals went separate ways. Another being that birds have no X or Y chromosomes -- their genetic machinery for sex is very different from ours.

some birds have X and Z

and 2 of the same shape in the males, while females have different

W and Z.

And no neocortex. Smart birds like ravens rely on a traditional system of ganglia to be smart, not on that hyped six-layered neocortex covering most of the brain.

Do we know whether this is also a feature of dinosaur lungs ? It might make an interesting sidebar in a Jurassic Park sequel.

I believe the ancestor of bird lungs first evolved in a branch of theropoda. I'm not sure what drove that adaptation but it proved useful fodder when much later the avia branch of theropoda evolved flight. This also mirrors feathers which seem to have evolved long before flight. It is likely small lightweight avia already possessed feathers, light bones, and efficient lungs which allowed them to do a tiny bit of gliding in their jumps and that is what led to flight. Once flight exists there's really strong pressure to optimize to the limit given the metabolic cost of flying.

Mammals descend from synapsids which branched off before sauropsids branched off into theropoda, reptiles, etc.

This particular bird reached an altitude of 4700m, but apparently the highest flying bird can reach 6000m:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%BCppell%27s_vulture

Found via: https://neal.fun/space-elevator/

https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/40553/20221018/flying-...

Seems the ones who live on the Japanese islands do this as standard practice.

Like their bigger cousins they use dynamic soaring. A technique for harvesting energy from the wind by up and down oscillations to cover distance rather expending muscle energy flapping their wings.

Afaik they can also lock their wings into glide mode with tendons without causing muscle fatigue to maintain flight for days on end.

Also using unihemispheric slow wave sleep aids in that as well.

Like in Dune, once you are in the storm, you have to go with the flow to survive.

Indeed, like any physical or metaphorical system of forces...

unless you're a salmon

Happened to me, in a canoe on a large lake. I had a lot of experience on small lakes, but large lakes also have large waves. Hadn't planned on that. It was either 'go with the waves' or go under

Tsk. Should have listened to more Gordon Lightfoot :-)

Or Stan Rogers

“Don’t take the Lakes for granted. They go from calm to a hundred knots so fast they seem enchanted.”

When I read the title I thought a bird had flown into a Eurofighter Typhoon. Probably wouldn't have made it home, even with the GPS...

Never mind this bird's journey. The most surprising thing about this is that they apparently have GPS trackers that are small and light enough to attach to a bird and have long enough battery life to be able to track them over longer periods of time.

I assume they don't catch the bird on a daily basis to replace the batteries.

Yeah. Some info

>GPS loggers (13–14 g, 2–3% of body mass; PinPoint VHF-GPS, LOTEK) were attached to the back feathers using waterproof tape (Tesa). The loggers were set to record the geographic position every 15 min and send data via radio communication to the receiver placed within the breeding colony when birds returned from the sea. The tracking duration of the birds ranged from 8.9 to 34.2 days (mean ± S.D.: 24.8 ± 6.8 days).

Reminds me of the people who have accidentally parachuted or para-glided through a cumulonimbus clouds, the stories are insane. Getting spun until they vomit, getting hit by tennis ball sized hail, frostbite, lightning and thunders meters away

How do we get a livecam on one of these things.

Somewhat related:

https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/altius-drone-flies-hurricane-ian/

I don't think white feathers and gray rainclouds at 240p would make for a particularly interesting watch

You're right, we need to strap a 4k 60fps GoPro on there

this kills the bird

Curious how it managed to find its way back home.

it had a gps

Quantum mechanics actually!

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-migrating-bir...

Link to the paper https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002...

I'm glad the article had a plot of the bird's path. It looks almost like a hypotrochoid that you could draw with a Spirograph set.

> scientists were lucky enough to have a record of this nuts nature-defying act

I don't believe "this nuts" was added by chance.

Very, very small sample size. This might be more common behavior than we realize.

can somebody PLEASE simulate this in MS flight simulator???

That’s awesome, it’s like Zelda fast travel from wind waker IRL lol.

This could be the future of transportation

Call me when Silicon Valley reinvents sailing

Amazon could fly hundreds of their more commonly sold items into a typhoon and distribute them over long distances while using very little energy

Maybe we could also solve some problem of garbage dumps? Build all the garbage dumps on a route of frequent cyclones and the trash just disappears the next Tuesday!

I don't want a cyclone every Tuesday. Not even to get rid of the trash.

Progress doesn't wait for anyone!

The cyclone supply will be fixed and unresponsive to demand

We could build ramps near common cyclone routes in order to launch the trash into space at escape velocity or at the very least into low earth orbit

...And it probably have odds of reaching the intended recipient similar to their "leave packages on urban sidewalks" program.

Nothing more regularly scheduled and reliable than a typhoon

Um, theyre putting (nontraditional) sails on cargo ships now, does that count?

I was about to mention this...

The original cargo ships looked like this:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b5/Ko...

There are apparently also green shipping company using newly built "actual" sailboats.

We live in strange times.

We're calling it... Sailr, the revolutionary green sea travel technology, it uses the power of our app to capture the wind to drive a turbine to generate electricity that charges your phone which you can then plug into our cybertwirl that propels your boat. Only $14,99 per month, in the App Store and Play Store.

Like OceanGate but for tornadoes. Love it

That’s a nice 1000km free ride

Fast travel unlocked

Based on the map, showing data both before and after the circular typhoon-caught pattern, I take it the bird survived? That's... I hope they didn't get hurt at all, but that sounds rather epic from the bird's perspective in retrospect!

> Happily, the bird survived and eventually returned to his feathered friends with quite the story to tell.

From the article

Oh! Overlooked it

> Regardless, looking at this wild ride highlights the increasing risks that seabird populations could face as climate change drives more extreme weather events.

Is this hurricane really an outcome of "climate change"?

The existence of hurricanes isn't, but the frequency and severity very much are.

Maybe not, but there might simply be more hurricanes due to climate change?

The increase in hurricanes is, yes. To claim specific hurricane is a direct result of climate change is probably not meaningful - they're all related to climate, and climate change is causing more to occur.

Precisely. When you keep rolling double sixes, check to see if the dice are normal. Climate change paints a "6" on more than one face of each die. Hence the so-called (now misnomer) "century storm" happening multiple times in one decade.

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