Science Visualized Animals

Capturing the wonders of hummingbird flight

Simulations illustrate swirling air currents around birds’ wings

hummingbird simulation

AIR SET ASWIRL  Small pockets of air circulate around a hummingbird’s wings in this image from a computer simulation of flight.

Yan Ren, Haibo Dong, Xinyan Deng, B. Tobalske (CC BY-NC 4.0)

By Andrew Grant

View the video

Hummingbirds are extreme athletes, deftly hovering and darting between flowers. Now a combination of high-speed filming and computer simulations reveals how the birds’ wings manipulate the surrounding air to aid in flight. The images seen here come from a video of simulated flight that won an American Physical Society Gallery of Fluid Motion award in November.