Jumbo jets do it, pterosaurs used to do it – and now we know that eagles do it too. As they come in to land, planes, prehistoric reptiles and steppe eagles deploy a flap on the front edge of the wing.
Using a high-speed video camera, Anna Carruthers and her colleagues from the University of Oxford filmed a male steppe eagle (Aquila nipalensis) as it touched down on its handler’s arm. The 500-frames-per-second camera caught the wing-flap movement as a feathery “travelling wave” that spread from the wrist of the wing to the shoulder. Previous footage had been too slow to catch this movement.…
