THE SPEED OF BIRDS.

Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1416, 16 October 1923, Page 2

THE SPEED OF BIRDS.

No subject is more frequently discussed among shooting men than the pace at which game birds fly. Does a grouse fly as fast as a pheasant? What is the difference of pace be- ■ tween a driven grquse and a driven partridge? What is this or that bird's normal pace, and how is it affected by the wind? And so on. These are questions asked over and over again every year; and perhaps we shall never get satisfyingly exact answers. But there are certain considerations and certain known figures which will help us to some kind of conclusion, writes "8.Q." in the Morning Post. Next, you cannot apply to a bird the exact mathematics of, say, gunnery ballistics. You cannot reason about a bird as if it were a projectile, and say that if a bird is flying with the wind exactly behind it, the pace of its flight is the speed at which it would be flying in a calm plus the speed of the wind; because, as a fact, birds very much dislike a wind exactly behind them, and, should they get it, they use it as a side wind, swinging and swerving across it, as you may see a covey of grouse come forward when the wind is blowing directly towards the butt. The birds are continually changing places and changing direction. A pheasant, in the same way, if he is flying down wind, is generally curling, too, as many men who have missed him in such circumstances have realised when he has passed them. Partridges, also, how often do you see a covey fly without swerving? It is because the French partridge flies fairly straight that he is an easier driven bird than the common grey partridge, but even his flight is not mathematically straight. We cannot, in short, be mathematically exact in these matters. Biit we can lay down one or two general rules, and compare many ascertained figures. We may begin with the general principle that "the larger the bird, the faster it flies." A grouse is faster than a partridge, a blackcock faster than a grouse. A swan flies faster than a duck. And there are various obvious ways of calculating the speed of birds. Partridges may fly side by side with a train going 30 miles an hour, or you may watch birds of many kinds flying on a line parallel with the direction of a motor car. Few birds look to be flying slower than a heron, yet the writer, driving a car at 25 miles an hour, had a heron get up near the road and beat the car by 50 yards in a distance of perhaps 200 yards. Swifts have been timed by Mr E. C. Stuart Baker, who, after constant experiments with stop watches, made them out to fly at rates varying from 171.4 to 200 miles an hour. Generally speaking, we may perhaps put the speed of game birds at not less than 40 miles an hour in ordinary circumstances, which the stronger of them, when pressed and going with the wind, can increase to a speed immensely greater.