Lorna Gibson

speaker

199 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 13 Jul

Lorna Gibson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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So, you know, you can see eider ducks in the Atlantic Ocean in the winter, and the water might be 38 degrees Fahrenheit.

And the birds are bobbing around, they're diving, and the down is keeping them warm, even in those cold temperatures.

And then the outer feathers are water repellent.

And all of these different properties

properties or all these different types of things that the feathers can do, they're all related to the microscopic structure of the feathers.

And it's one of the things that I find just amazing about birds.

Oh yeah, I think that's quite well understood.

There are people who study various aspects of that still, but the basic ideas behind it are understood.

For instance, there's people who fly birds in wind tunnels.

So the same way that somebody training for a marathon might run on a treadmill,

If you fly a bird in a wind tunnel with the wind flowing past at a certain speed, it's like being on a treadmill for the bird.

And so it stays stationary, but it's flapping and it's doing all the things it normally would do when it's flying.

And when you think about flight and how it works, there's really four forces involved.

So one is the weight of the bird acting downward.

And obviously, in order to fly, the bird has to overcome that weight.

And birds have a number of aspects that really reduces their weight.

They have lightweight bones.

The feathers are lightweight.

And so they have fairly low weight.

If you compare the weight of a bird to a similar sized manimal, the bird will weigh less.

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