Quite often, people, admiring the beauty of the sky, wonder: why does a bird fly? Why is it not possible for man to soar in the sky, admiring the beauty of the earth from above?
The answer is obvious. First of all, birds have wings that humans do not have. And if you look more closely at the bird’s wing, you can see that it has a curved shape and is able to create a force that counteracts gravity.
Bird feathers are very light, but at the same time complex horny skin formations that, during evolution, were transformed from reptile scales. It is thanks to the feathers that the surface of the body of the bird is smooth, and when it flies, the air flows around its body without much resistance.
The skeleton of birds is very light. Several bones in it contain air cavities. They do not have red bone marrow, as in humans. This is another answer to the question of why the bird flies, but man does not.
Birds have a large heart, as it must guarantee rapid blood circulation during flight. In addition, their blood contains more red blood cells than the same mammals, which means that the blood of birds can carry more oxygen per unit time, which is very important for flight.
In birds, the lungs are well developed. They are associated with air sacs that are located in the body cavity. In addition, they have a very developed cerebellum, which regulates the coordination of movements. All this is quite important for the flight.
There are gliding and flapping ways of flying. The planner is characteristic of predators such as a golden eagle, eagle or hawk. Waving is divided into hovering and horizontal flight. Most birds flap their wings, but seagulls and cormorants freeze during flight.
Which bird flies above all
Here, the indisputable leader is the African vulture (refers to the type of vultures). With his participation, such a case was recorded. In the mid-seventies of the last century, one of the vultures collided with a jet plane. And this happened at an altitude of more than 11 thousand meters (I must say that Everest is 2 km below this height).
Why does a bird fly high, or rather why? Predators thus look out for their prey. This also applies to migratory individuals. For example, Indian geese rise in flight above the peaks of the Himalayas when they fly between Tibet and India, and do this twice a year.
Which of the birds are marine species? Seabirds do not have many species - there are only a little more than 200 out of 9,500 of all species of birds of modern fauna. These include representatives of the tube-nosed beetles: butterfly petals, albatrosses, and petrels. Most copepeds: frigates, cormorants, forest edges, phaetons. This also includes gulls, eiders, puffins, eels, guillemots, and, of course, penguins.
Loon and cormorants can be called feathered submarines that dive and swim beautifully underwater. And here the question “why does the bird swim” and not “why the bird flies” is already relevant. Sea birds have acquired membranes and leathery caps on their paws, which close their nostrils when diving.
By the way, seabirds rather awkwardly move on land. Most of the time they are on the water, eating fish. Moreover, when they dive after it, they reach speeds of up to 3 meters per second and go to a depth of several tens of meters.