For The Birds

Perhaps best of all, I used to ride my bike down to Lake Spenard, the world's largest seaplane base then and now, to watch birds and floatplanes transition from water to sky and back again. I'd monitor the flocks of ducks and geese in impromptu short-field competition with Cessna 180s, Super Cubs, Maules and Beavers, all on floats.

The birds always won. One look at the competitors explained why. In contrast to the graceful wings and swept body of a mallard duck, even the most modern seaplane looked clumsy and crude, like something Klingons might fly into battle.

I studied and photographed birds while in high school (at the risk of being considered a dweeb), read what I could about how birds fly and compared that with man's primitive efforts to lift himself into the sky.

Living in Alaska made ornithology an easy, if unlikely, preoccupation for a teenage boy whose other dominant interests were (predictably) target shooting, cars and, of course, girls. Funniest thing, I never mentioned to my friends that I was into bird watching. If I had, they probably would have assumed I was using the British term for "women."

I learned that birds are aerodynamic marvels the likes of which mere man can probably never hope to emulate. Though there are no rotary-winged birds, many of the existing varieties can lift off with virtually a zero takeoff roll, then land (water?) in the same distance. With the benefit of wings that can articulate almost infinitely through sweep, dihedral and angle of attack, birds can perform maneuvers that would leave even Patty Wagstaff and Sean Tucker green with envy.

I lived in Venice, Fla., for a year back in the late '60s and used to walk down to the beach to watch seagulls fight for the bread crumbs I'd take with me. I was always amazed at how quickly a totally empty beach, with nary a bird in sight, could turn into an instant seagull convention after I threw the first handful of crumbs into the air.

A dozen gulls would seemingly materialize after the first toss. By the second handful, there'd be 30-40 seagulls crowding the airspace, squawking and snapping up bread in midair, performing aerobatics that made a lomcevak look tame by comparison. With a combination of wing warping, variable sweep, asymmetric lift, fully controllable dihedral and a variety of other tricks, those seagulls showed me maneuvers I could never duplicate in an Extra or Pitts.

I've watched hummingbirds perform seemingly impossible turns, darting left or right with apparent immunity to the G-forces involved, and I've even watched them fly backward. In fact, hummingbirds feature a resilient bone structure that provides both strength and flexibility to allow amazing proficiency at hovering and changing direction in an instant. Inevitably, a researcher using a high-speed camera calculated their turns and twists at a maximum of 10 G's. That's more than the most aggressive fighter pilot can endure and well outside the limits of America's best jet fighters.

Birds have proven their superiority to humans (at least this human) and airplanes on numerous other occasions. Once, while trying to coax a Cessna 207 across the Pan American Pass in the Chilean Andes of South America east of Santiago, I spotted a huge condor soaring in thermals near the ridge, his wings seemingly immobile as he somehow magically arced uphill. His wingspan must have been nearly 10 feet.

I took the hint and joined him on the opposite side of the thermal. I followed the condor in his ascent for several thousand feet, watching him monitor my curious aluminum bird mimicking his every action. I worked the lift until I had the altitude to cross the ridge, then broke away and managed to sneak across the high rocks to Argentina before the big Cessna descended into the granite.

(It may be a local myth, but the story was going around years ago that a Lan Chile crew, operating a Boeing 737 at FL330, spotted an Andean condor cruising above 23,000-foot Cerro Aconcagua, the Andes' highest mountain.)

Another time in the '80s, I was flying my Mooney above Northern California, cruising at perhaps 150 knots, when what looked like a bird overtook me on the left and passed by at least 25-30 knots faster. My best speculation was that it was a peregrine falcon. They're allegedly capable of speeds in excess of 180 knots, and this one seemed to be doing that or more.

A bird also may have helped me find my destination in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. In the late '80s, long before the age of GPS, I was flying an Australia-bound Navajo below an overcast of thunderstorms and miscellaneous meteorological misery, when the nondirectional beacon at Majuro went off the air 340 nm from my destination. Majuro is about 2,000 nm from Honolulu, and except for Johnston Island 700 miles out, there's not even a rock sticking up to navigate by. I had little choice but to find the atoll by dead reckoning.

I spotted a seagull below holding a steady course, his wings barely fluttering in the updrafts off the water. He seemed to be flying in the same direction I was, so I turned slightly left to follow his heading and spotted the ring atoll two hours later.

It turned out there'd been a power failure on the island, and someone had allowed the gas tank for the NDB's backup generator to run dry. Fortunately, the seagull didn't need the NDB.

Birds have an impressive ability to maintain flight for long periods of time, partially a function of their capacity for reading the wind. My buddy, bush pilot Butch Patterson, and I once set down on a remote Oregon lake in his float-equipped Skyhawk and watched several bald eagles glide effortlessly for what seemed like hours, occasionally swooping down to snap up a rabbit or a mouse and deliver it to their nests.

One small migratory flyer, a bar-tailed godwit, may hold the record for sustained flight without refueling. The bird was tagged and fitted with a GPS encoder in Anchorage, then tracked by satellite from Alaska to New Zealand nonstop in nine days. That's nearly 8,100 nm without changing tanks.

I've been fortunate to fly a wide variety of airplanes in the last half century, some that could perform some amazing tricks. None of them, however, was as talented as even the simplest bird.