Action analysis

I've spent a lot of time looking at birds folding their wings, birds flying, birds taking of and landing (which involves folding their wings). Most of the time though a lot of this folding of wings, and I'm still unsure how exactly it works. It's a pretty complicated mechanism... I got a much better idea though.

The blog I had made last year for my action analysis module came in use now to have another look at my research of birds movement back then. I also looked at some nice high speed slow motion videos on youtube of birds of prey, and downloaded a video of a group of vultures constantly landing and taking off (and fighting with each other) from different angles, which was quite useful to click through frame by frame.

My old action analysis blog on birds in flight: http://howdotheymove.weebly.com/birds-in-flight.html

When a bird folds its wing they move their 'arm' upwards first ('hand' is still pointing downwards), they spread it out, move it upwards, then the 'hand' with primary feathers is folding in and folding underneath the secondary feathers (of arm). The primary feathers really seem to curl around. All feathers are 'squashed' more together. I first thought that the secondary feathers would be quite fixed, but they seem to also fan in a little.

I found the following document about drawing birds quite helpful, especially for the section that covered the different layers of feather + how they behave when folding the wing. http://majnouna.deviantart.com/art/Drawing-Birds-part-1-22106533

Below are some very pretty drawings... I made while watching slow motion videos of birds, to figure out what they were doing with their wings while folding. them It is not entirely clear, as it wasn't entirely clear to me yet either...

Next is a break down of some fragments of the video I downloaded to study wings folding. It was helpful seeing them from different angles.