Â鶹´«Ã½

Do winged animals like birds ever suffer comparable mishaps to those of human-made aircraft, such as aerodynamic stall, wing icing or hard landing?

Chris Woolf
St Neot, Cornwall, UK

From observation, controlled flight into terrain seems to be the most common failure. As with human-controlled aircraft, when vision becomes unexpectedly confused, birds fly into things, such as windows, with terrible regularity. Geese seem good at water landings, but I have watched them topple ignominiously when hitting a piece of weed or ice that didn’t register in their flight plan.

As for stalling, birds seem to make a virtue of…