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Review
. 2016 Sep 26;371(1704):20150387.
doi: 10.1098/rstb.2015.0387.

Into rude air: hummingbird flight performance in variable aerial environments

V M Ortega-Jimenez  1 , M Badger  1 , H Wang  2 , R Dudley  3
Affiliations
Review

Into rude air: hummingbird flight performance in variable aerial environments

V M Ortega-Jimenez et al. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. .

Abstract

Hummingbirds are well known for their ability to sustain hovering flight, but many other remarkable features of manoeuvrability characterize the more than 330 species of trochilid. Most research on hummingbird flight has been focused on either forward flight or hovering in otherwise non-perturbed air. In nature, however, hummingbirds fly through and must compensate for substantial environmental perturbation, including heavy rain, unpredictable updraughts and turbulent eddies. Here, we review recent studies on hummingbirds flying within challenging aerial environments, and discuss both the direct and indirect effects of unsteady environmental flows such as rain and von Kármán vortex streets. Both perturbation intensity and the spatio-temporal scale of disturbance (expressed with respect to characteristic body size) will influence mechanical responses of volant taxa. Most features of hummingbird manoeuvrability remain undescribed, as do evolutionary patterns of flight-related adaptation within the lineage. Trochilid flight performance under natural conditions far exceeds that of microair vehicles at similar scales, and the group as a whole presents many research opportunities for understanding aerial manoeuvrability.This article is part of the themed issue 'Moving in a moving medium: new perspectives on flight'.

Keywords: flight; hummingbird; manoeuvrability; perturbation; rain; unsteady flow.

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Adult male Anna's hummingbird flying at 6 m s−1 into the von Kármán wake generated by a vertical cylinder of diameter D. For a 4 cm diameter cylinder (a), two counter-rotating vortices interact near-simultaneously with the bird, whereas for a larger cylinder (b; 9 cm diameter), shed vortices interact more sequentially with the hummingbird, inducing greater asymmetries in kinematic variance. (c) Schematic indicating decay (i.e. decreasing line width) with downstream distance x of a turbulent wake generated by a stationary cylinder at Re ∼ 103 [28], and the expected additional flight costs as a function of position within the wake for an animal flier of wingspan b relative to the cylinder diameter. Zero-flight cost indicates the cost of flying in steady flow with no cylinder present.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Long-duration exposure of an Anna's hummingbird shaking off water while perched (a) and when hovering (b) in moderate experimentally generated rain [38]. (c) Vortex street produced by a falling water droplet (approx. 2.5 mm) falling at approximately 2 m s−1.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Schematic illustrating effects of millimetre-scale raindrop impacts on a small (a) and a large (b) flier. Impact force per drop transferred to small insects (here indicated as a fruit fly) is small but can produce a large torque. By contrast, larger animals (here indicated as a hummingbird) can be hit by multiple drops at the same time, but with a more balanced spatial distribution over their body and wings. Flight control in rain is thus more challenging for smaller animals than for large ones.
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