Hi there, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Cloudbase Mayhem. Giving you an extra little bonus show this week. We're filling it right back in. We had some gaps back earlier this fall, but now I'm just recording shows like crazy and I want to get them out to you. So I've got a great show for you today that's in a totally different realm, still flying, but it's with Hannah Jane Williams. She's not a pilot, but she studies soaring birds. birds. She's in her postdoctoral research project at the Max Planck Institute in southern Germany. Her back door is the Northern Alps. And she started looking at paragliders going, I wonder if these pilots can answer questions we've been trying to study for years with soaring birds. And they put all kinds of, you'll learn about this in the show, but they put all kinds of trackers and
little gizmos on the birds that send back all the data. And they're trying to figure out how how birds make decisions in the skies. And Adrian, who I had on the show, you heard about flying off all the volcanoes in Mexico. So you gotta talk to these folks. This research they're doing is fascinating and birds fly a lot better than we do. And I'm sure we can learn something. And I really did. We had a great talk. I think you're gonna love it. Before we get to it, a couple of things of housekeeping. The first is the talk I had with Kirstie Cameron. I talked about the Zeno and how it has proven itself to be a pretty safe wing and a good entry-level two-line glider, and quite a few people reached out to me after that and said, "Great podcast," but I think that was maybe not the best way to say that.
There have been a lot of accidents on the Zeno, and probably I don't think that has anything to do with the wing. It has proven itself to be a very solid two-liner, like I said in the show, and this isn't a knock on that wing whatsoever. It's probably just a lot. I think it's one of their best-selling wings; a lot of people are on it, and we have accidents in this sport, so probably just numbers and statistics are very difficult in our sport because every country models it differently, takes in the information differently, and chalks it up differently, and most accidents probably just go unreported. So, but several people did reach out out and said, man, I've seen a lot of accidents on the Zeno. I don't know about that. And I, again, I don't think that's a knock on the wing, but we probably should have just been more clear that it's still a two liner.
It still can bite. They're much harder to recover. You know, recovering a high aspect wing and two liner wing is way different. It doesn't have nearly the passive safety of a lower level wing. So keep that in mind. I know you all know that anyway, but just wanted to make that clarification. The other thing is until Friday the 10th, If you buy advanced paragliding, if you don't have it yet, so between the 1st and the 10th, anybody that buys it in that realm, in that period of time, will be in to win a private days coaching with me here in Sun Valley, Idaho, sometime in the next year, whenever it works for you. Or if that doesn't work logistically for you, then we'll do three one-hour Zoom calls. So if you don't have the book yet, get it, get all tuned up for the season. There's lots of great advice and information in there.
And Cross Country Magazine did a wonderful job putting it together. It's really quite beautiful. I love how it came out. It's their best-selling book, apparently, of the year. And yeah, a little shameless plug for the book. So go to xcmag.com forward slash shop to get the book and be in this raffle to win a day's coaching. Or if you're in the States, you can get free shipping on a book directly from me. Just go to cloudbasemayhem.com forward slash shop. Okay, Let's get into the show with Hannah Jane Williams. I really enjoyed this, and it's just fun to talk about different aspects of our sport in it, in this time, in a completely different way. So we all have a passionate love of birds; we're trying to be birds ourselves, and Hannah studies birds, so enjoy this show.
Cheers, and
I think we've been trying to do this for, I don't know, over a year, but I appreciate Adrian for giving me the shout out and introducing me to you and your group. And thanks for sticking with me through all this crazy lifestyle stuff that we've both been having. And I appreciate you being on the mayhem show. Thank
you. I'm glad to be here. Tell me about, yeah,
I mean, your project. Let's just, let's get into it. Tell me about your project, because I don't often have have non-pilots on the show, but this is, uh, you're definitely somebody I want to talk to, and I think the audience is going to really enjoy this, um...
So, I—I'm a movement ecologist that's normally looking at the soaring flight of birds, um, and recently started thinking about other things that are in the air, and that's gone over to paragliders. And, uh, my project right now is, I'm interested in how paragliders may be looking at each other to find the air, um, and think about how birds might be doing the same thing if they're watching each other to find air flows. And I'm interested in how you guys manage to find the air, but specifically what you're looking at when you're flying.
fascinating because you know the air is uh famously quite invisible yeah so it's It's kind of the magic of what we do is trying to see what's not often really clear. And do you study any particular types, all types of soaring birds, or is there kind of a one species focus?
It's gone through different species, different places. I did my PhD, and that was on different vulture species in South Africa and Europe. Europe. And then you move through and I did a postdoc that was on the Andean condor in Swansea University with Emily Shepherd, carrying on with some research of hers. And then now I've moved to Germany and looking at different, the same species, but we also work on storks here as well. And every, all of them are soaring birds. They're still using the air, but they They have different morphometrics that change how they could be used in the air. The rules are the same. So I can jump between species and now jump to people.
So, I mean, take me through how a study works. Well, firstly, where are you right now? And we're looking at this office building. I saw you when you were walking around earlier. It's big. Is everybody there working on what you're doing or is everybody working on different animals and different projects? So
I'm at the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behaviour in the south of Germany on Lake Constance. And here we have, it used to be an institute for ornithology that was specifically interested in birds and migration, really. But it's grown. And now I'm sharing a building with a load of primatologists that are interested in how different groups of primates operate. operate. Um, there's people working on storks around me, on eagles, and then we have a group that's interested in how the dynamics of a group work in people or fish, so there's some collective behavior stuff and some movement stuff. Mine kind of does a little bit of both of those things, interested in how you move together, how
Did you get interested in birds? Um, that's well...
I wish I had a beautiful answer for you, but you go down the path and you end up where you end up because you just enjoy each step along the way. So, I started with studying killer whales and humpback whales in Scotland and was looking at how they operate as a group, and then went and did some work with some gametes and seabirds, and it just took me further down this route. All of those, those things have had in common that we use technology to see how an animal moves without having to observe it, and both the water and the air lend themselves to the to those for different reasons. Um, and so whales and birds is kind of, it's a, it's a good place to be if you're interested in movement and have this technology, you
mentioned you worked with you worked on vultures down in And in South Africa, I had this real privilege of being able to go through kind of a rescue center when we were doing a project in Malawi a few years ago in South Africa. And I learned a lot about vultures and just how endangered they are. Is what you're doing depressing?
Yeah, sometimes. No.
So when you're thinking about how an animal is moving in the air, I find it very exciting. So, it's not directly depressing when you think about the pressures that are acting on them; then it can become a bit depressing. So, the vulture problem being that there's a lot of poisoning events, and as soon as one vulture lands a poisoned carcass, then hundreds of them land and they're all dead, really, and affected by it. And when I was in South Africa, there was one event like that, um, and it just—it wipes out a group, a local group, and so that is depressing, yeah. But recently, been moving into other areas of research that it's exciting. So, you—that gets forgotten about a little bit, and you have to bring yourself back to the general picture, just
Because I'm so clueless on on how these things, how these kind of studies get funded? Is the Max Plank is that all? Is that that all grants? Is it government? How does it do? You apply, and then you get kind of free reign to go with it for a bunch of years, yeah.
That's exactly that. So, every three years, every five years, you would apply for another big general project that will have some link to what you did previously, and then you would get funding for research, for salaries, for students to join that, and that's how I you end up going down the path because it's a balance of the money available and what's your drive, so together the two things influence where you end
Up, yeah. How do you study birds? How do you, how do you gather the the data on, I'm assuming, lift and drag and all the things that affect soaring? Now, how does, how do you do it, uh?
So I use biologgers, and biologgers are, are like your phone, and they have different sensors in them, and you attach them. It'd be awesome if your people could see, but I have loads, I have stuff around me. They're like a little box that's full of technology inside of different sensors. It looks
like a vario, well
This is for a paraglider, for those of
you, for those of you who are listening, yeah, I was gonna say that it looks just like a little
Vario, it doesn't do the beeping quite as much, but it's right. It's usually collecting different types of movement data, and you attach it to your animal, let it fly off, and then either different schedules, different recording schedules—you might collect it a week later, two weeks, or a couple of years later, or even it's on the animal for a lifetime. But they all have very different designs, and obviously we don't want to tag anything with something heavy for a long period of time, so you balance what you're asking of a tag and the questions that you want to answer. So, this is a tag that I would actually put on a paraglider, but the technology is actually exactly the same as what I would put on a condor.
Are you able to kind of cross-reference, okay, you put it on a condor in a place that condors fly and put it on a paraglider in a place that paragliders fly, I would think a hang glider or something might be a little more matching in ability in terms of speed and stuff, but they are... you able to go, "Wow, this paraglider sucks compared to that condor" in terms of finding lines and and just using currents of air. It's
Interesting, I haven't. So I've just started working with a group of paragliders. Um, you've actually had one of them on your show, Malin Lobb, and I haven't yet looked at their data, but we're in a collaboration where he's helping me. The team's helping me figure out how birds could be moving together, but in return, I want to give him some stuff back that could help them figure out how to fly better, or if there's some, yeah.
Let's see where I get. I'll take commissions, take different orders. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I can't really tell you how to fly better, but I can say I can give you averages in the same way that we compare. We look at flight performance in birds, and maybe that could influence your decisions in flight, but also your decisions of how you operate together. I hope there's some feedback between the two that would help me understand birds and help paragliders understand their flights as well in
Your research, what's the biggest driver of where a bird goes? Is it their own unique feel of the sky, or is it how they're operating in a group dynamic? Can you tell stuff like that and
we don't know, so that that's the the thing that we're most interested in is predicting where animals go, and to do that we have to understand the decisions at each point of movement. If you decide to turn left or right, if you decide to fly for a great distance in one direction, right, um, and where you're going, why you're moving, there's a lot of unanswered questions. So space use is a big topic within animal ecology, um, and movement decisions. Now, obviously, every day they're going to be moving between their rest sites and their foraging sites, so food is a big driver of movement, but then on a longer term, it might be migration, and that you're You're moving from one hemisphere to another, probably for food and for safety or for warmth.
So there's these different drivers at different scales and trying to find out what's happening at each decision point is what we're interested in.
Yeah, tough to get inside the mind of a bird. Yeah. What bird have you studied has the longest migration pattern? And is that therefore the hardest one to study because they're not around as much?
So the the longest migrations are often of shorebirds that are going from, uh, the northern hemisphere to the southern hemisphere. But then you also get round-trip migrations with less of a migration, but long-distance trips where you're circumnavigating the the Antarctic, for an albatross, for example. So they're long distances; it doesn't make them harder to study because these tags, tags should always follow them and work over that time. But what it does mean is that you have to have batteries that are going to last a long time, fill that whole migration period. So you probably look for simpler data if you are tagging an animal for a long time.
So it's the whole package is smaller and the story is a bit simpler is
This is, this the tag you put on that little device you just show me? Obviously, that's for the pair letter, but the tags you use for the birds, is this something do you need to retrieve it at some point to be able to get the data, or can it send it back as it's going? You know, is it a, is it a capsule for a, an astronaut capsule, or what am I trying to say? You know, they're, they're getting the feedback all the time as it's going through space. Are you doing the same thing? You got to get it back. We
have a bit of both and again it all all depends on your animal and the question that you're interested in. So with the condors, Swansea University, they build their own tags that you need called daily diaries. And that's what they're doing. They're making a record of daily movements and daily patterns. And those tags you have to retrieve. So they devised some really awesome ways of getting tags back from animals. Like, the condors have automatic release systems and awesome people out in the Andes that go and, um, bind those tags once they've dropped off an animal. They have this automatic release, but then, whoa, other things—you manage to get them to send the data back to you via mobile phone networks or satellites.
And usually, that's simpler data because of the amount of power that's required to send data, so If you're interested in very fine scale movements, you have to collect the tag, and the daily diaries are recording at like 40 times a second. You want to know the physics of movement, whereas if you want to know a migration route and get GPS tracks through um going from the northern to the southern hemisphere, then you could send the data back to you, but get simpler of data back. What
Is your loss or destruction rate? Imagine, not many. If you send 10 out, how many to get back? So...
With the condors, there was a learning curve on how you got them back, and so they've dropped off. How do you then find them once they have dropped off? And every tag back is a win, completely. And hard one, there was quite a small percentage given the um, the effort involved with going to find a tag. And then with other animals that return to a nest site, for example, a nest site faithful, the percentage of the likelihood of getting your tag back is very high. But that's another thing that we factor into how long you want it to be on the animal. If, when I was working with whales, for example, we'd have a tag on for a few hours, um, to try and get basic—not basic, it's complex—movement and behavior, but a nice basic understanding of what they're doing during the day.
So the tags pop off automatically a few hours later, and that's because we don't want the animal to start swimming off to a place where we could never find it and get the tag back. So it's, it's this balance, thinking about what the animal is going to do, how predictable is its movement, to be able to get the tag back if we need to retrieve it. Do
You have a favorite bird? Can I ask that I find
It hard because there's some it's, I'm very interested in how birds move and their ecology, and so every, every bird has a different strategy to deal with that, so they're all equally interesting from my point of view. I have some that I have like memories and connections with, that put them higher up that list, but my drive is the biological question, so the favorite bird kind of disappears, whereas you go, you go walking with an orthodontologist, and they're like, they've got a list, and they need all that, all of those birds on that list, and yeah, I haven't quite got to that point yet, I
Would imagine to be a successful study, you have to be quite, uh, you're, you're trying to be as low profile with the birds as possible, right? You're trying to have as little, little interaction I would imagine is possible, but do you get to know these birds a bit? Do you get to spend any kind of you
get to know them afterwards, I'm mostly
Just tagging and letting them go, yeah, exactly.
You get to know them afterwards, so once the data's come back, you start to feel like you've got a connection through the bird because of the data. Yeah, that's the—the unfortunate thing, it's what we have to do. You don't want to be invasive, that's the—the thing we're trying to avoid. Um, you don't want to disturb them. So afterwards, you get more of a—I get a connection with the data, anyway, and I think most of us do, especially if that's long-term data and you can follow it over years. And um, you start—you have a personality associated with that data. I have to be careful of that word in science; personality is a controversial word, sure. But um, yeah, you do, you get an attachment.
I
Spent a long time at sea, and so I have this incredible affinity for the albatross. Is watching them at sea, and I, you know, I didn't spend a ton of time in the Southern Ocean, but enough to—that's where you usually see them. Molly hawks more around Southern New Zealand and stuff, but just unbelievably impressive. You know, they can go from, what I understand, uh, you know, when I was on a sailboat, we don't follow them very far, but they're, they're there and gone, but they never flap their wings. So efficient lift right off the swell, that's just—it looks so peaceful and
Calm and easy, oh.
Just, they just own it. Have you studied? Have you studied the albatross? No, I haven't.
yes so there's people there's the movement ecologists ecologists or behavioral ecologists that are using the same devices, biologgers on albatross and looking at their movements and how often they flap and where and how they move and the energetics of that. Yeah, there's a few different groups working on albatross, different species. Very similar to the way that we think about the soaring, thermal soaring. Yes, it's a different type of soaring that an albatross is using, but there's still the same trade-offs that they have in their flight and their strategies for movement. So there's comparisons that we can make between land and seabirds.
Something I would imagine most, especially predators, I would think, engage in is play. play, and you know, when we—when we fly, we see birds most definitely playing. They're not just hunting, or I mean, it certainly seems like it in any way, you know, that some seem a lot more fixated on hunting, but others just, you know, they're just doing loops and cruising. And I guess, you know, maybe they're catching bugs too, but they're—they certainly seem like they're having a really good time. Have you been able to document that? Is that something you see regularly in—in birds? I
would go towards the side of no because we're trying to... it's makes sense that every decision an animal makes should balance different trade-offs. Now play could be interesting if that helps you practice flight; if it's something like that, then it, then it has a benefit. It shouldn't be wasteful of energy, especially if you're a soaring bird, and then all of a sudden you're kind of screwed and... And you've got no energy reserves left in it or potential energy, we say. So you're playing so much that you lose height and now you're stuck. Yeah, there should be a trade-off between a benefit and the cost. But I'm interested in that. What do you think is play?
Do you play as a paraglider in that can you afford to mess around?
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's, there's the whole acro side of, of flying both in hang gliders and, and in paragliders. And that would definitely be defined as play because, you know, what we're usually concerned about is our glide and acro just destroys it. You go down very, very fast. So you're not worried about your glide anymore and you're just having fun. or, um, but I, you know, certainly if you're, if you're trying to go somewhere, then playing is destroying that, you know, the trade-off is, is steep, but if you're just, you know, the mountain right behind my house here, most, you know, 99 times out of a hundred, when I fly off that, I'm just flying to go play just to, you know, just to have fun.
And that could be, you know, doing maneuvers that are, uh, you know, in opposition of staying in the sky. Uh, so, you know, when I watch falcons and not, not as much with eagles, they usually seem pretty intent, you know, they're more serious bird. But when I watch, you know, falcons and, uh, they, the smaller kind of predators, they sure seem to spend a lot of time horsing around. And, and again, I, I, I, you know, we can't see the tiny bugs, you know, we see them all the time when they're clearly hunting bugs when, you know, cause bugs get caught up in a thermal and that's often a real good marker.
And when you start seeing all the little starlings and smaller birds, you know, gathering them up, but they're, you know, kind of like you see manta rays do when they get in really thick plankton. They'll, you know, instead of just flying along like they normally do, they start barrel rolling because it's just a more efficient way to feed. So maybe that's what the birds are doing. there'll be loads of different you could say that
It's speeding, it would could be practiced, it could be testing the air, it could be, um, that there's different pressures that are relaxed at a certain time, but play is the—it's an interesting word, it's a, again, a controversial word, I would say, because there should be a reason for it. With it's interesting, there you say like, um, when you're messing around compared to when you're in the race. And this is why I'm interested in paraglider racing; I could look at comparing different aeronautical relationships between birds and paragliders, but if I want to look at the decisions, then your behavior has to be similar. And so the race of a paraglider is what's most interesting to me, because then you, you have a goal, which is what we predict animals have every day, like feeding is their goal.
So the strategies should be similar then to make some comparisons, but
When you see, you know, up here in the northwest, very much like where you're from in the UK, when you know the the shorebirds that are soaring, you know, just your standard seagull, um, certainly they're not feeding or doing anything except I'm just enjoying it, aren't they? They just seem like they're just cruising, you know, just back and forth and up and down and, you know, yelling at one another and
Yeah, but what's the overall goal of that movement? There could be something at a larger scale that we can't see, which is why biologuing I like it so much because you can relate a specific moment in time to an overall movement path at a scale we cannot follow them over. So you're seeing one little part of their day when you're on the ground seaside watching them, and who knows what information they could be gaining whilst they're playing or whatever what you want to define it as. Um, interesting.
I still think they're playing
So what, what have you learned? I mean, maybe it's still too nascent, I don't know, but uh, you know, I know you've been at this project—you were saying earlier, at least eight years—but what are we missing? Is pilots what do birds? Because, you know, that's always the goal is to, and we can sometimes, maybe I don't know how hard they're trying, but we can outclimb birds. Uh, you know, you get in the same thermal, and you know, that's always the goal, but they will never, you know, they, our best pilot, uh, pretty unarguably is a guy named Chrigel Mauer, and you've probably heard of him. He's called the Eagle, and he's won seven X-Alps in a row. And they call him the Eagle because he's so good at flying and picking lines.
But anyway, my question is, what do they know that we don't?
I don't know. That's the question for us, too. It's why are they so good at it? I mean, evolution has taken them down that route of needing to be good at it. If this is a strategy they're going to exploit, then they should optimize that, especially for such a heavy bird where if you get it wrong, it's incredibly costly. So, evolution's got something to act on their pressure, uh, how they find these thermals or updrafts, we don't know; and the perception of a bird of different air, we still don't know either. And so, every, we're trying to get there to understand how they're able to do it so well, and we're starting to get there with this technology.
But that's why, I mean, they
don't have a vario in their brain, well
They might, so they should be able to sense the air once they're in it. Um, for sure, and whether that's something to do with angles or pressure changes, we're still exploring that. But then, how they see their world, or what—what is it they're actually looking for as cues of different air flows? We're really interested in that. And they could be static cues; it could be other animals that are like, what I'm interested in, if there's another bird ahead moving in a certain way, is there some way of understanding what the air is from that movement? And I was listening to one of your other podcasts and you—you use the word instinct to be able to thermal and find thermals, or do it really well.
And that's what we're trying to get at. How, how is it so automatic, seemingly automatic to fly so well?
Yeah. I mean, they, they seem to just go to the right place. They seem to have just much more, their feelers are much more sensitive than ours are. Part of that may just be that we start relying lying more and more as we get better and better on our instruments, and that sounds opposite how it should be, but you typically, you learn you don't have a vario, you're just, you know, just worried about launching and getting to the ground safely. And then, as you start thermaling, you start using instruments and varios, and you know, we're always told and talk about on the show a lot, you should fly a lot without one to just develop that natural instinct and watch the horizon and try to, of feel the better part of a core of a thermal than than just hearing the different tone in the in the vario.
But birds just have all that; it's ingrained, or certainly seems like it is.
It's the the evolution of fencing movement. I mean, we do it in our movements, but we're used to walking on the ground and we can sense what we're interacting with in that environment—the floor or the substrate, if you're walking on sand or on something hard. But the birds should be doing the same. That's their environment. And if we're going into it with technology, we need to learn from them how to do it. And that's what all of your senses are providing you with, the same information that they have evolved to sense.
Paragliding is really risky because we're human and we're dumb and we make mistakes, and mistakes in aviation are pretty costly. The ground is hard. You said something there I wasn't... I was kind of surprised to hear that. You know, what if a bird makes a mistake? You know, especially if they're a big bird, it could be quite costly. Do they make mistakes? I've never seen a bird make a mistake. Do they crash? Or they get in badly? Or do they... they hit the deck? Yes.
There are different, uh, definitely different mistakes with the the condors. Um, in Argentina, there's a group there that have been working with them by Sergio Lambertucci and he as they've been looking at different anecdotes as well of what's happened. And you'll often get birds that walking around and it's as if they've landed and now they've lost the lift and they've got to go find it. And even anecdotes of condors walking up mountains to go and find lift. Um, they have amazing legs and yeah, if you can't take off from the ground where where you ended up landing, then you've got to get yourself out of that situation to go find lift. And you see it in different other ways. Uh, if you make a mistake by landing at a carcass that's full of other birds and it's very competitive, then you've made a costly decision.
And then also, if you make a mistake and you miss a thermal, or you arrive at a place where there's no longer a thermal for some, if it's an intermittent, you're between the thermal bubbles, then you're gonna have to pay the cost of flapping and expensive flight to get you to stay airborne and avoid that landing. whereas for you guys, for the paraglider, you have to land and then some some guy's gonna come and pick you up, as I learned this summer that there's a lot of picking up
Somebody, or if you're in the race, you just keep walking. Yeah, yeah, every time I bomb out, it just means I have to walk. That could
be doing, but it's anecdotal because we can't watch them all the time. Maybe with these tags, we can try and understand when there's mistakes made, but so far we're still trying to understand what's the difference between right and wrong, or um, a decision that was made purposefully or something that they was unavoidable. There's a long way to go yet to understand that
Which bird, in your opinion, is kind of the king of flight? Who does it? Which bird does it most efficiently? That's
Impossible to answer. It's impossible because they all are very different; they've all got different strategies that they all, um, have evolved to be the best at. Their strategy, so a condor is the the heaviest soaring bird, so it's incredibly efficient at its type of movement, but then it needs to fly in the Andes and it's restricted; it can't go fly anywhere because the the air to support them isn't everywhere. So then maybe a all-rounder bird is a bit better, that could do both thermaling and flapping like a stalk, but then it's evolved a different way of life and can migrate.
So everything's everything's awesome; they have all evolved to be good at what they do. Yeah, it's hard question, yeah.
I had an experience with an eagle in Alaska. I did this Alaska traverse a few years back who I was struggling to figure out how to get across a glacier in front of me. It was really, really late in the day, and I knew I didn't have the height to make it across the glacier, and you don't really want to land on a glacier, uh, the crevasses it was getting. It was also pretty late, so I would have landed and had to walk across in the dark, which wouldn't have been good. And so I was just trying to stress, kind of struggling with, should I go or not? Should I go or not? Should I try it or not? It was a long glide, and there wasn't going to be thermals over the glacier, you know? And this eagle came out of a tree and took me across it. It was like he'd read my mind, and he knew where I needed to go, and he just came out and got right on my wingtip and kind of looked over at me, and and then he started flying towards the glacier, and I thought, well, hell, why not?
I'll give it a try. And he did. He brought me across the glacier. As soon as I got across the other side, he took off. He just banked left and went somewhere else. So in my mind, he's the best, okay?
But then, are you watching them often? You must be watching them all the time and thinking about it. They're gonna show you the way. There are
Greatest marker they really are. I mean, birds are, are really what you're trying to observe, and there are places in the world where there's tons, and they're incredibly helpful, and there's places where you don't get much bird help. It just really depends, uh, even around here we have lots of birds, but it depends on the day. It's just, it's a funny thing, and then of course it depends on how high you are. You know, here we're very often way up over 15,000 feet, and you know, you don't see a ton of birds out there, but you do. They're out there. So, but yes, I mean, they're, you know, if they're turning, like you said, I, I think birds try to fly pretty efficiently, so if they're turning, that's telling us that that's a thermal we're going to, yeah? You know, we very rarely don't go to climb that a bird is in.
I mean, that again, it's most of the time it's invisible unless you've got smoke or something else that's helping you out, or a big defined cloud that's clearly growing and marking a thermal, that you know the air is invisible and they see it better than we do. I'm sure
It's interesting, though, that you wouldn't say no to a thermal if there's a bird in it. If there's a bird in it, does that mean that it's big enough? It's still strong enough for you to, as a massive paraglider, to use it almost
Always, I mean, there—there are exceptions to that, you know? They—they're clearly, you know, they're so much lighter and they're so much more efficient that, you know, they can suck you to a thermal that is working for them, you know, a very, very low rate for them too, but it wouldn't be enough for us. But most of the time they don't fool with those either. You know, they, they're, they're messing around with the better thermals as well. And they don't, they don't, they won't use that unless they really need to, I guess. I can't say that for sure, but usually it's very rare to go to a climb that a bird is in. It's not useful to us; it definitely happens, you know, often we're just too late. You know, we'll see them climbing by the time we get there.
That thermals, either we call it pull the rope on you, or pull the ladder up on you. It's above your head, you've missed it, or it's just dying. You know, the thermals really cycle with the day, so it's... you can miss it, but most of the time a bird's a pretty good bet. There's
So much you've said there that I'm interested in, I could turn this interview around and so, without asking you questions, it's a conversation we're having. A conversation, I want to know, like, say if you—if you see another paraglider, then will you always follow it? Or because, for me, as a prediction, it'd be you only follow those that are in stonking thermals and great ones that you see are experienced and more experienced than the new or better at that, those that location know the location well or something great.
observation. So the answer is no, definitely. If you see another paraglider that's not automatic that you're going to them, I'm sorry, another paraglider that's turning there, that's when the horizon really matters. So if you're in a two meter climb, for example, and someone in another part of the sky is in a four meter climb, that's pretty obvious that they're in a better climb and you should leave unless you can't, if there's any risk of you leaving your climb and not making it to that climb, you know, in other words, you're not very high, uh, or that thermal's dying and you, and you know that it is, which is harder to tell, but then you wouldn't leave. But most of the time, you know, we're taught observation is everything in our sport.
And if someone's in a better climb, you need to go to of them. But if I'm in a climb and then somebody else is in a climb and I can't tell, you know, if it looks the same, then no, I'm going to stay where I am because my climb might get better. But if it's obvious they're in a better climb, I'm going. So you're exactly right. Birds are the same. Again, I wouldn't leave if I'm in a really good climb, especially over the average of the day. You know, there's, you start to kind of map the day with, you know, Early on, the climbs aren't very strong. Later in the day, the climbs are very strong. If it's in the middle of the day, and climbs are really strong, you know, historically for the last hour, say for example, you know, you've been in three, four-meter climbs, then I'm not going to waste time climbing into two. And so you wouldn't move if I'm in a stonking climb and there's a bird over there and I can't tell if he's out climbing me or not, then I'm going to stick where I am.
He's saying exactly what I want to hear most of the time. They
Don't, what's that? He's
saying exactly what I want to hear because this is the—it makes so much sense, but trying to say that that's happening for a bird too, that's really difficult to grasp. Like, just how much they should be paying attention to others and whether they should say yes to every other thermal or balance it with what they're doing themselves and make, um, informed decisions, and that's what trying to look for
it's interesting the more I think about it too, you know, it was very surprising to me early on when I started realizing that you can actually outclimb birds. And I've always assumed that's just because they're not trying very hard. You know, it does, you know, they're clearly better climbers. And so, you know, I often wonder if that's just really on that scale of what you're talking about, the cost, you know, maybe they don't need the height and they're just really more observing and looking around because I've often also been in really strong climbs that they've brought me to, but they leave and it's still a very good part of the climb. I end up gaining another 2,000 or 3,000 feet or something in that same climb and they just keep going. There's
different theories for that. But
maybe they got scared of me. Maybe they don't like being in a climb with me either. I'm awful big. So who knows? But
then it depends if there's another thermal coming up, If there's an expectation that you've got enough height to reach the next thermal, then go for it with your speed. Go get some distance and do that quickly rather than waste time in a thermal if you don't need that height to keep traveling. Again, different strategies.
Totally. And that's super important for us when we're trying to cover distance is maximizing all of that. And, you know, you don't want to waste time climbing in something that's, you know, if it's, if it's been a four and it drops to two, you have to leave immediately. There's no reason to keep climbing. You're just wasting time. You know, every time we turn is, is Stephen Smoker said is very famous pilot in our community that, and Chrigel talks about all the time, you know, every time we turn or half the time we're going the wrong way. So you want to turn as little as you possibly can. And I imagine birds are the same. The penalty points seem, again, not always, but historically, the percentages of winning following a bird are really high.
Typically, you know, their lines are almost always better. In other words, between thermals, from one thermal to the next, or just when there aren't even thermals, when they're just cruising through the sky, it's a pretty safe bet to follow their line and take their line. They just seem much more sensitive to a boatier, liftier line than we can ever feel, so a
lot of practice as well not only Only if they got the senses and different cues that they can use, that could be their territory. For an eagle, for example, they have a territory and they could be flying that same route every day or every so often that means that they have got good practice and they should have an expectation of where that next thermal is.
Fascinating. So back to your original purpose of the study, you're looking for, You're trying to decipher decipher what they see and using other birds to impact their decisions, correct? If I worded that correctly? Yeah, um, yeah. Have you learned anything specifically from that in terms of how other birds work around one another that could be useful for us, or vice versa? Have you learned anything from paragliding that goes the other way? So...
This is it's the very start of this project, and as we were talking about funding as well, and we're still halfway through that process, so um, hopefully the next few years we'll go really into this um project with the cow groups move to find thermals. But we have, there are some things out there already about information that you can gain by watching another bird, information that birds can gain from each other. So we did some some stuff on risk um taking that if you have another bird ahead of you, you can take more risks in the glide and increase your flight speed. So if you increasing your airspeed, then you're going to hit the ground quicker, so you have to guarantee that there's a thermal coming up, and that's what information is doing.
Whereas if you don't know, and you're completely unsure of where that next thermal is, then you should conserve your height and fly slowly and cautiously, and that and you now we're onto something
And you, you've seen that in birds. You've seen that; that's how they operate.
Part of my PhD was on risk flight with social, when you've got a bird ahead of you and that could say that you should fly together. And there's the other side of that with some, some of my colleagues here and Max Plank, that we're doing with, uh, work with stalks that says if you want to keep together as a group because you want to maintain that information source, but then that means that the ones at the front are flying how they want to fly, and the ones at the back have to keep up, so they might have to fly more, they have might have to flap more, sorry, to keep up, which is costly. But then, otherwise, you lose your information, so you have to keep up with the group, and it has different trade-offs, so we're getting there. We're starting to see different aspects of moving in a group, how that's a benefit, but so the reason I want paragliders to understand than what you're actually looking at, which we can't do with a bird, but
I'm still, every single word you just said is competition paragliding. I mean, that's it in a nutshell. That's, that's exactly everything we're thinking about is exactly what you just said. You know, in a typical, you know, free flight race paraglider, hang gliding, there's 130 pilots and they're called race to goal, you know? So this is where you get driven up the mountain and you fly a course in the sky and Everybody's trying to race it as fast as they possibly can, but, uh, you know, it's very risky to go out on your own and get out ahead and not have the information. So it's this constant juggle of, of using everybody else. We call it pimping. You're using all the data from all the other pilots and still trying to win the race.
So when do you break, when do you take some risk, when do you hold back, when do you try to stay on top, when do you go out in front? So, I mean, this is exactly what we do. Fascinating.
It's the same thing. I never even thought that birds would do that. Well, they have a race every day to get to the food quicker because they all land usually at one big carcass and they're using information both to find thermals and to find the food. Most of these soaring birds are scavenging; they're not hunting. Eagles are still using soaring and hunting, but they can flap as well. So there's this, again, another trade-off that means you really need to stay together with the group if you're reliant on thermals, and the food is also something that is sparse. So yeah, they have to keep together, and their race every day is to to get to that carcass first. But again, a balance; you don't want to go it alone because then you could, you could risk falling out of the air before you get to the food is
Your world in in terms of the studying birds, is it very tight-knit? Or are there Max Plank Institute type places all over the world? You mentioned the condors in South America and the vultures in South Africa. Do you, you all know each other? You all get to spend time on Zoom and compare notes. How does that all work?
I guess our kind of meets are the conferences. With you, you've got your races and different, and you would go, I guess, collaborate or network and maybe fly with somebody else that you want to learn from or something. We're doing exactly the same, and we'll meet each other at conferences, present what we've got, and also the technology brings us together a lot of the time that we are trying to make advances in how we capture animal movement. So even if you work on a completely different animal and you're not working with birds, you're working with whales or with the primates here, you come together when you want to share that technology to look at the question you're interested in. So yeah, the people in Argentina, for example, Are looking at different parts of the ecosystem, from condors to mountain lions.
There, they have different aspects that they're interested in, and then we come together to collaborate on the specifics that we—we share an interest in, you
have the coolest job. I'm, I'm very impressed. It's just so, it seems so, it's so great to be able to kind of follow your passion and find this pretty unique little niche and, uh, I could see on your face how excited you are about it. It's what a fascinating project. Thanks for sharing it with, with me and the listeners and, gosh, good luck. I, I reach out if I can ever help. I'd love to be involved in this somehow. I'm the opposite of a scientist, but thank God for science. Well, I need paragliders now.
Um, I'm very interested in the races, so I hope next year I'll be working with, um, um, some of the British team, hopefully through Malin, and then, uh, I hope to keep looking at different teams through these, these races, yeah, see how you all move together. And my hope is to tag all of you at once, so when you're in your race, you all fly out and all of you are like my, like birds. There's something that's very difficult with birds is to be able to tag them all; you can't. That, if you can tag all of the paragliders in a race, you know exactly who's looking at who. So I'll come find you.
Yeah, do. Please do. Hannah, thank you. I appreciate it. Thanks for your time and good luck. And thanks for sharing this knowledge. We'll tap back in in a couple of years and find out what you've learned.
Yeah, that would be awesome. Thanks. If
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