Hummingbirds are the fighter pilots of the avian world, diving and weaving at speeds of up to 55 kilometers per hour—then turning on a dime to hover midair, wings frantically beating, as they refuel on nectar. Now, through herculean efforts, researchers are one step closer to figuring out what makes the animals so nimble. The new work not only helps explain their complex choreography, but it may also lead to more maneuverable robots and drones.
Biologists have clocked how fast hummingbirds can fly and how long they can hover, but maneuverability—all that zipping back and forth—is “notoriously difficult to study,” says Peter Wainwright, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California (UC), Davis, who was not part of the new work. That’s because “it involves a complicated set of possible movements, and it’s very spontaneous.”
That didn’t stop Paolo Segre, then a graduate student at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He decided to try by filming hummingbirds in the wild, which are less inhibited about flying than their captive counterparts. To prepare, he spent the better part of a year perfecting and miniaturizing a four-camera, computer-coordinated system for high-speed filming.
