“Soaring, tumbling, freewheeling” – from Icarus to Aladdin, humans ache to fly. We not only watch birds, we deify them; comparing them to angels and hope itself. And now new technology is helping scientists understand birds’ own secrets: from why starlings “murmur” in vast dances, to how they navigate across the sky.
For Dr Aldina Franco of the University of East Anglia, it all begins with a ladder and a piece of string. In Portugal’s southernmost Algarve region, she can often be found climbing up trees or the sides of houses, surveying the nests of white storks. “They are quite surprised but they are not aggressive,” she says, as she describes the process by which she lowers the birds to the ground and fits a lightweight tracking device across the creatures’ chests, “like a backpack”.
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