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Videler J.J. 2005: Avian Flight. Oxford University Press, New York, 258 pp., 79 figures, ISBN 0-19-856603-4
Apart from bats, birds represent the only living vertebrates which have defeated the gravity and are capable of active flight. This is a key adaptation that made them so successful. Bird flight has fascinated mankind since time immemorial as indicated by an 11,000-year-old pre-Indian cave painting in Mexico. Early naturalists and philosophers wanted to know how birds can fly upwards the sky and many inventors propelled by the human everlasting desire for flying tried to find a solution how to cope with aerodynamic principles by careful observations of airborne birds. Although a lot of work has been done since that time, detailed understanding of avian flight is difficult. Movements of birds aloft are usually too fast to be followed easily, measurements of physiological processes in a flying bird even harder to take, and studies of the responses of the surrounding air severely hampered by the invisibility of the wake behind a bird. Therefore, many features of flight physiology and specific features of behaviour during take-off, landing, and various types of flight are still to be explored.
John J. Videler has been studying flight performance in birds for...