Flycatcher: the clue is in the name

May 17, 2015 • 3:09 pm

by Matthew Cobb

Here’s a great video by Robert Martin of a male Pied Flycatcher (Ficedula hypoleuca) at Gilfach Farm, Radnorshire, Wales, doing what comes naturally. This was filmed just under a year ago – 31 May 2014 – and shows the casual agility of these birds. At least it was quick for the insect.

Just think about the complexity of the neural circuits that enable the bird to recognise the incoming arthropod, plot an intercept course, then move its body to the appropriate point and take the necessary action, all in a few dozen milliseconds. That’s the power of natural selection. Truly awesome, as Professor Ceiling Cat would say.

h/t @edyong209 on Tw*tter

23 thoughts on “Flycatcher: the clue is in the name”

  1. Flycatchers are amazing–one of my favorite groups of birds (I named my cat after one).

    Fun fact: old world flycatchers like this one (muscicapids) aren’t related to new world flycatchers (tyrannids) despite being pretty behaviorally and visually similar.

  2. Wow, one moment he’s cleaning his armpit, the next, he’s got the insect! The slo-mo at the end of the video still happens fast.

  4. And I can barely catch a fly with my hand- and that’s when the fly is bouncing around on a window. Though Ralph Macchio can catch them with chopsticks. 😉

  6. I’m guessing the “plot an intercept course” isn’t as tricky as it might sound. It’s probably more in the nature of a feedback loop that says something like “Observe the radial motion of the insect on the retina, and move the head in that direction until the radial motion is nil.” No complicated math needed.

    2. I would bet that the flycatcher employs the same technique that bats use, which is not like catching a ball.

      Many animals, including humans, use a method called constant bearing to intercept moving targets.

      “CB is a time-optimal solution to catch targets moving along a straight line, or in a predictable fashion—such as a ballistic baseball, or a piece of food sinking in water.”[*]

      This paper,Echolocating Bats Use a Nearly Time-Optimal Strategy to Intercept Prey*, describes a study that found that bats use a distinctly different method for tracking moving targets.

      “Our analysis of the pursuit trajectories suggests that bats use a constant absolute target direction strategy during pursuit. We show mathematically that, unlike CB, this approach minimizes the time it takes for a pursuer to intercept an unpredictably moving target.[*]

      A very cool study I think many here would find interesting.

  7. I think this is one the slo-mo guys (Earth Unplugged) need to have a go at capturing!

  9. I love the local flycatcher species we have here in Missouri, the Tyrannidae, specifically Tyrannus forficatus, the scissor-tailed flycatcher. They are just beautiful! and then there’s the Eastern and Western flycatchers (we get some overlap from time to time) Tyrannus tyrannus and Tyrannus verticalis. Unfortunately, they are field and pasture birds, and I’m in a wooded area, so my encounters are limited to roadsides and the occasional baseball diamond (when they have lights for night games) which makes it hard to both drive and birdwatch.

  10. They’re truly amazing birds. We were diving a reef one time and heading in, about 10 miles off shore. One of these little guys landed on the boat, apparently quite exhausted, and indifferent about all the big diver guys staring at him. We had been plagued by some stinging flies coming in, and once he’d caught his breath, he nailed them all in mid-air, one by one. These were not lazy, slow flying flies. I write code myself, and the thought of writing a program that could accomplish what that little bird brain was doing is the stuff dreams are made of.

    1. Maybe he showed up on purpose, knowing there’d be flies where there were divers?

      1. Could be. After all, it’s been claimed that crows are smarter than chimpanzees. Then again, maybe it was just a case of very fast evolution – what you might call a punctuation in the equilibrium.

  12. Brief twinge of disappointed lechery here. “Doing what comes naturally” was English slang in my youth for having sex…

  13. Great catch! In the Americas though, at least, flycatchers usually catch insects by sallying— sitting on a perch (like the one in the clip), than flying out to grab the insect in mid air, then returning to the perch to process the insect (which sometimes involves some banging of the insect against the perch before swallowing). This flycatcher benefits from having insects obliging enough to go by at neck’s length away!

    I kept waiting for the bird to sally, and didn’t notice the catch until the slo-mo replay at the end.

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