Taking Flight: The Epic Story of Life on the Wing
- ISBN-10
- 178396703X
- ISBN-13
- 9781783967032
- Series
- Taking Flight
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2023-05-04
- Author
- Lev Parikian
Description
A bird flits across the sky overhead. It's an everyday occurrence, repeated hundreds, thousands, millions of times daily by insects, birds and mammals across the world. It's something so normal, so entirely taken for granted, that sometimes we forget how extraordinary it is. For centuries all humans could do was watch and wonder, earthbound - but even now, for all our technological advances, put us in a flying race against a mosquito or a beetle or even that reluctant last-resort flier the red-legged partridge, and there will only ever be one winner. Flapping, soaring, gliding, hovering, diving - the miracle of flight has evolved in hugely diverse and fascinating ways, whether in a fruit fly or albatross, swift or Quetzalcoatlus, pipistrelle or common darter. From the mechanics and aerodynamics of flight to different techniques and phenomena such as flocking and migration, Taking Flight explores the unique abilities of thirteen flying species, celebrating flight in all its myriad forms, and urging us to look up and drink in the spectacle of these gravity-defying marvels.
