Its wings three feet wide and pointed its tail long and tapered its head hooded black with thick sideburns on its cheeks its back the color of blue slate its belly and legs striped white and brown. Looking in, a prince of raptors glides on the wind. Nineteen floors up in the lower building, the elevator door opens to the special events room, where the big game in June and July was playing out on the other side of the glass bowl from which you have a panoramic view of the Boston skyline, the Charles River and Boston Harbor. An adult female in flight over Boston University (Jesse Costa/WBUR)įrom our studios at WBUR, you can see for yourself by crossing the trolley tracks on Commonwealth Avenue and heading to one of two recently built towers Boston University constructed for student housing. The growing peregrine falcon population marks not just resurgence, but a dramatic shift of habitat. They are landing on tall ledge tops around Boston and the region, where once they were nearly extinct. Now comes the rise of another high-flying elite: peregrine falcons. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)Īs Boston pushes skyscrapers upward at a record pace, it's attracting more than the normal flock of developers, captains of industry and the well-to-do seeking luxury views. Here, an adult female perches on the StuVi2 Tower at Boston University. The Brazilian free-tailed bat might be faster at flying straight lines the hard way, but tell that to a hungry descending falcon.Facebook Email Peregrine falcons are landing on tall ledge tops around Greater Boston, where once they were nearly extinct. The mighty peregrine falcon can reach speeds exceeding 200 mph when it dives down from great heights. Still, even with this victory for the Brazilian free-tailed bat at horizontal flight, the mammal will never reach the top speeds of the fastest animal known to man. Their bodies are not as aerodynamic, they have big ears and stubby noses, and their wings, made from skin, are not nearly as efficient as those covered in feathers. The results are surprising because bats simply aren’t built to fly faster than birds. “Most of the time, these animals are moving at moderate speeds, but what we see here is that they exceed these expectations and quite dramatically for brief periods of time,” McCracken says. Not only did the Brazilian free-tailed bat maintain consistent speeds of 62 mph, but it could apparently accelerate all the way up to triple digits. Each night for a week, they would catch a bat with a net, glue a transmitter to its back, and follow it in the air for hours in a Cessna 172. The researcher’s work took place in southwest Texas, where they waited outside a cave for the nightly emergence of their subjects. That’s why they went to all the effort of gluing sensors to seven different bats and following them in an airplane to determine their flight speed. What McCracken and his team did expect to prove was that the tiny Brazilian is a lot faster than people generally thought. “We didn’t expect these results, even though the Brazilian free-tailed bats are known for their exceptional fast flight,” says Gary McCracken of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, one of the authors of the study recently published in the journal Royal Society Open Science. That’s more than 30 mph swifter than the common swift, the bird previously thought to hold the horizontal-speed record. The Brazilian free-tailed bat is officially the fastest horizontal flier in the world, according to researchers who recorded the little winged rats flying at speeds of up to 100 mph. Move over birds, it’s now the time of the bat - at least when it comes to flight-speed supremacy. Photo: Joel Sartore/Getty Images/National Geographic The Brazilian free-tailed bat, fastest winged creature on Earth.
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