From Arikasha Kornienko
Low and slow. The winter and cloudy day made for an interesting glide for the female Snowy.
Beautiful, invisible, silent, deadly.
this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2026
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I want to know how much trial and error is involved until they manage to just skim the ground and not drop that last bit too far and go rolling 😜
I assume gliding birds also experience ground effect like aircraft do.
It's like a little cushion of air (not really, but that's what it feels like when you're trying to land with a little too much speed) right before you touch down making it easy to float close to the ground for a while.
Very good point I hadn't thought of! I don't understand much from that link, but from the sound of it, even a human flying the plane can feel a significant difference in handling characteristics, so a bird that has a bunch of nerve ending in those wings must get a ton of feedback about what it going on.
When you're in ground effect, you have smaller wingtip vortices, less downwash, and more vertical lift, all of which dramatically reduce induced drag.
This makes it sound like it also conserves a lot of energy for the bird to fly this way, perhaps the opposite of how vultures hover for hours on warm air currents, these Snowies are hovering on all that dense cold air close to the gorund?
Stay on target . . .
It would be quite embarassing to miss from that close.