100 FLYING BIRDS: A Photographers Notebook
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ADVANCED READING FOR THE PREFACE
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LEONARDO: TREATISE ON THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was fascinated by the possibility that humans might fly like birds. Some of his musings on the subject are collected in the “Codex on the Flight of Birds”, eighteen handwritten double-sided pages in Leonardo’s unique mirror script. Written between 1505-1506, and once owned by Napoleon Bonaparte, the Codex is now in the Biblioteca Reale, Turin, Italy.
Museo Galileo. 2004. “Codex on the Flight of Birds.” Codex on the Flight of Birds (BRT), c. 15v. 2004.
OTTO LILIENTHAL
Otto Lilienthal (1848-1896) was convinced that humans could fly by reproducing the flapping flight of birds. He grew up watching storks fly and built his first pair of wings before he was 15 years old. He later became a serious student of flight and in 1889 published a book called Birdflight as the Basis for Aviation.
A 1911 English translation was published:
Lilienthal, Otto. 1911. Birdflight as the Basis for Aviation: A Contribution Towards a System of Aviation. London: Longmans Green.
and is available as a pdf here:
Lilienthal, Otto. Birdflight as the Basis for Aviation. : A Contribution Towards a System of Aviation
Accessed September 17, 2019
This book was republished in 2000 as a paperback here:
http://www.amazon.com/Birdflight-Basis-Aviation-Otto-Lilienthal/dp/0938716581 .
Accessed September 17, 2019
THE WRIGHT BROTHERS’ PATENT
The wing warping patent, US Patent number 0821393, granted to O. and W. Wright on May 22, 1906 is described here:
Wikipedia contributors, "Wing warping," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wing_warping&oldid=911046745 (accessed September 17, 2019).
BIOMIMETIC AIRCRAFT
There are several scholarly journals devoted entirely to transferring design principles from nature into practical engineering use. These include:
Bioinspiration & Biomimetics
http://iopscience.iop.org/journal/1748-3190;
BioMimetics
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/biomimetics
[Both websites accessed January 21, 2019)
HUMMINGBIRD PHOTOGRAPHY
There are more details of hummingbird photography “studio style” in Chapter 2. A useful guide is published on the web here:
http://www.birdsasart.com/hummingbirdguide.htm
Accessed January 21, 2019
A NOTE ON ACCESSING SCIENTIFIC ARTICLES
In many places, I have included primary sources from the scientific literature to allow the interested reader to follow up. Don’t be intimidated by the fact that these articles were written by professional scholars. Good scientists do good science AND many of them write understandable, accessible reports!
Some of these articles are behind pay-to-play firewalls. But many others are what is called “open source”, meaning that the full text and all the figures are freely available to anyone. Here are some ways to find those articles:
a. DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers)
The International Digital Object Identifier Foundation is a not-for-profit group that oversees the organization of, and enables access to, digital content. It is rather like an enormous on-line library catalog for digital documents that are somewhere in the cloud. The concept is that access to the documents through the DIO will be available for the foreseeable future: while individual websites will come and go, the doi link should be a “persistent interoperable identifier”.
For example, when you type this link in a browser:
https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.181588 Accessed August 3, 2019
you will visit the doi.org site, and then be automatically redirected to The Royal Society publishing site here:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.181588 Accessed August 3, 2019
If the entire article is available (see below), there will be a link to the PDF version so that you can download a copy for your digital library.
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