Have you ever thought how long a bird can fly without resting on the ground? Felix Liechti and his colleague at the Swiss Ornithological Institute found out the alpine swift, a small migratory bird can fly for more than 200 days without touching the ground using new sensing technology.
This technology works as to attach a small electronic tag on the body of the birds and the tag collect data every four minutes of the bird's location. The result shows that the bird stays in Europe for summer breeding and then migrate to Africa for the winter, thousands of miles away. The only flaws of this research is as this tag sends the data every 4 minutes, so there is a chance the bird might touched down the ground in between these intervals. But still, I think it is cool study to show that this tiny bird can fly over 200 days without resting!
If you want more information,
Go to http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2013/10/this-bird-can-stay-in-flight-for-six-months-straight/
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