Common swifts can stay aloft for up to 10 months | Hacker News Reader

Common swifts can stay aloft for up to 10 months

nytimes.com

122 pointsmhb51 comments

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Here is a proper article: http://phys.org/news/2016-10-ten-months-air.html

And a link to the paper: http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)3...

So they can stay aloft longer than the Swift language can stay backwards compatible? :)

Objectively, yes.

Where can I find a more technical description of the "logging" device that weigh less than four hundredths of an ounce?

Love to study that - power source, communication methods, etc.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_level_geolocator

That's a really clever solution to a unique set of domain specific constraints!

I had no idea this was a technique! From a British Antarctic Survey report on these devices[1]:

    Accuracy
    In field trials at Bird Island, South Georgia, the mean
    error (great-circle distance) in position estimation
    of static devices was 85 km, with standard deviations
    in latitudinal and  longitudinal errors of 0.61° and
    0.99°, respectively (BAS, unpublished data).

[1] http://polaris.nipr.ac.jp/~penguin/oogataHP/pdfarticles/23p2...

Unit conversion: 0.04oz is approximately 1.14g, which sounds pretty impressive. But it can't be much heavier because a common swift typically only weighs around 35-56g (that's 1¼–2oz) according to http://www.commonswift.org/swift_english.html

According to the Wikipedia article linked by mongol, these devices can be as light as 0.3g. It's a battery, a phototube, a clock, and a recording chip. Longitude can be reconstructed from the time of most/least light, whereas the length of day and night allow reconstruction of latitude. Battery life is between 6 months and 5 years.

There are some pics and prices of similar devices here (form £95+vat) http://actionforswifts.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/new-light-weig...

And some technical description in the paper, page 12 http://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdfExtended/S0960-9822(1...

I think they have a microprocessor, a battery, some sensors and flash memory. To get the data out you have to find/catch the swift and remove the device. The device wakes every 5 mins and records briefly.

Makes you wonder if - given enough time - they (or perhaps a larger bird) could evolve the ability to maintain a completely airborne life-cycle.

You realize that birds lay eggs right?

Oh come on, use your imagination. The feet evolve for carrying eggs. They re-develop live birth. The young learn to hang on from the first moment. They fly earlier. That's just the ideas from 20 seconds of thought.

Sorry, I guess I was thinking realistically how this could happen.

If you don't know dolphin exists, it's not that reallistic how it could happen either.

I do know dolphins exist.

You realise that Emperor Penguins pretty much do this already?

When the egg is hatched, it cannot touch the ground or it will instantly freeze and the chick will die. So the female lays the egg onto her feet, where she holds it until she transfers it over to her partner, who will hold it on his feet for the weeks it takes the female to walk back to the ocean and replenish her energy reserves. When the chick hatches, it will spend the first few days (weeks?) of its life on its parents' feet, still never touching the ground, before it is old enough to venture out itself.

Evolution comes up with some pretty weird solutions to hard problems. :-)

So? They'd lay eggs with wings.

Slight spoilers, but: https://www.amazon.com/Airborn-Kenneth-Oppel/dp/0060531827/r...

So, basically fish, in a thinner medium? There must be perpetually airborne macroscopic lifeforms flying/floating through the upper layers of some gas giant somewhere..

My layman theory for why it hasn't happened yet is that evolutionary pressure is not high enough. I believe the main advantage of not having to breed on land would be safety from predators. I guess there is no shortage of "safe" places.

Islands nobody's ever heard of, where they can build nests safe from predators that don't exist there.

It blows my mind that these birds spend summer in Europe, then migrate to Africa where they stay most of the year -- without ever touching ground there.

Don't birds need to preen their feathers periodically? That seems like a tricky maneuver while flying.

Reading the supplementary data [0], some of their results rely on sampling for 1 second every 5 minutes. So a bird could make occasional short landings for a quick preen & stretch without it necessarily being detected.

[0] http://www.cell.com/cms/attachment/2069927387/2067831537/mmc...

Preening has a few purposes; cleaning is most obvious, and beside that are straightening out disarranged feathers and ensuring that secreted oils are evenly spread for waterproofing.

For the swift in cruising flight, none of these requirements is likely to apply; the slipstream itself will help a great deal to keep the feathers in aerodynamic conformation, and dirt, parasites, and bodies of water are rarely found at altitude. (Rain is a plausible concern, and I'd be curious to know how swifts cope. Given their small size and altitude of flight, I wouldn't be surprised to learn they rarely notice any but the heaviest of storms.)

A couple months ago, another similar fascinating story about frigatebirds was on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12036725

And an older story about swifts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6527669

So what and how do they eat and drink?

Likely flying bugs. Plenty of fluids and proteins.

Random source; yep, pure insectivore. http://www.commonswift.org/Hand_rearing_Swifts.html

Anyone else here who checked the URL for "/2016/04/01/"?

No, why?

Why would this be an April fool's? Birds are amazing! This one has a variable-geometry wing adapted for an enormous degree of flying efficiency, and can spend almost its entire life aloft, landing only to lay eggs and rear young. They're fast as anything, too - the fastest known bird in level flight is a swift - and fly at altitudes well over a mile, where the air is too thin and the ascent too time-consuming for a lot of birds ever to go.

In a lot of ways, the swift is the Concorde of birds - small, sleek, astonishingly fast, and accustomed to operating in regimes beyond anything accessible to most of its kin. Fortunately for the swift, though, it need not rely on the mercurial good graces of Airbus to stay aloft.

Welp, scratch the New York Times off my list of news sites. That goes straight to a login page now. No article, nothing.

Does the web button underneath the story help you?

I agree; it's terrible that journalists expect to be compensated for their labor.

Its weird having HN submission where only a subset of HNers can make comments though. I am happy for them to have a paywall but question whether it should be kept on HN if there is no information for most people to comment on.

It is the equivalent of linking to a paid book on Amazon and having a discussion about the book's content.

It's not paywalled. NYTimes automatically redirects to the login page if you have cookies disabled.

The link works fine if you haven't disabled cookies - and that's on the user as much as it is on the NYTimes.

I don't have cookies disabled but I do have adblock and I get the paywall, but if I open it in an incognito window it shows so I'm guessing its also triggered by ABP (or some other condition).

Well, if 99% of the book was freely available for viewing on 9 other websites than Amazon, I bet that people would complain A LOT for being given a link to Amazon instead of one of the numerous readable sites.

> It is the equivalent of linking to a paid book on Amazon and having a discussion about the book's content.

I'd wager, without proof for the moment, that the majority of books discussed on HN are 'paid books' at Amazon or elsewhere.

To be fair, Blindsight comes up on a very regular basis, and that's freely available on the author's web site. :)

But yeah, despite the increasing prevalence of legitimate free-to-air soft copies of books, paid is still the default.

So what can we do to stop these terrible things from happening?

Well, as all of us in Silicon Valley know, regulations are nothing more than irksome impediments to the march of progress. Let's roll 'em all back.

Works in the Tor Browser.

Enable cookies and click the link again.

This is how I got in:

Open an Incognito window in Google Chrome. Go to nytimes.com. Search for "Common Swift Bird". Sort by "newest". Go read the article.

I was only able to get past the login page once I cleared all nytimes cookies from my browser.

Right click and open link in private/incognito window.

so does that mean the language updates more frequently than the bird?

But what is its unladen air-speed?

It's over 9000

What do you mean? African or European swallow?

Depends on the species; the white-throated needletail has been clocked doing about 170km/h, which is the fastest yet seen of any bird in level flight. (Peregrines, commonly awarded the "fastest bird" laurel, of course outdo this by far - but only in a power dive, where they get 9.8m/s² for free.)

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