Based on the impressive maneuvering performance observed from our artificial forest cluttered flight trials, work by post-doc C. David Williams has asked how pigeons traverse narrow vertical spaces. This work shows that pigeons adopt one of two strategies, wing pause or wing-fold, to negotiate narrow spaces. Interestingly, pigeons shift toward a wing-fold strategy as spacing becomes more narrow. Using a mass-distribution model of the pigeon (Ros et al. PNAS 2011), we found that wing-folding reduces collisional rotational instabilities of the bird by about 18-29%. Wing-pausing used...
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