Amazing – these tiny birds spend 10 months/year in the air! No logistics backup required 
Check this out: http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-common-swift-flight-20161027-story.html
Well, they can eat, pee and poop while flying as opposed to us… I guess they only really need to get down to reproduce 
I would spend 10 out of 12 months flying too if I could!
Aviathor wrote:
Well, they can eat, pee and poop while flying as opposed to us…
Loriot, a famous german comedian, once pointed out that indeed the human is the only animal who can eat a warm meal during flight…
I am sure that those birds will dive down, catch a mouse and it will still be warm when eaten in flight.
Not new information, I think. They eat flying insects, so only come north when these are available. And they have no north residents competing for food. Only the other migrants, swallows and Martin’s.
I’ve seen swallows and martins on wires but never swifts.
Hope I’m not boring you guys with these stories from the Animal Kingdom, but I find these flying exploits fascinating. Here’s another one: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/12/world/asia/beijing-cuckoos-migration.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
Aviathor wrote:
Well, they can eat, pee and poop while flying as opposed to us…
I think you missed the main party trick – flying while sleeping. We can eat just fine unless there happens to be too much workload. But we can’t source food while in the air. Peeing is manageable (trying to hold it is IMHO not a good strategy). There are, however, no pilot seats with an integrated toiled. Also, they can exercise while we sit around which isn’t good for us.
I have often wondered if the ‘electronic tagging’ of wild animals and birds has any adverse affect on the survivability or success of the tagged individuals. Seems to me there ought to be a detrimental effect since any additional weight and bulk, even if small, must erode the natural efficiency of the creature.
Yes, tags can significantly impact on the animals, but as you can imagine you can tag anything from an elephant to a beetle so there are no hard and fast rules as to when it becomes a problem. I very much doubt these tags incorporate radio transmitters so all your data is going to be from animals that survived their migration and were caught again at a later date to have their tags removed and the data downloaded.
The article mentions light sensors – the tags I’ve come across that use these simply measure the duration of the day and use this to work out the latitude on this basis. An accelerometer could just be a tilt switch. You can add a microcontroller to this – and as it doesn’t need to send out a radio signal the battery can be very tiny. The whole package might weigh less than a gram. It’s a good field for 1980s style tinkerers.
