Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren bogel Bomb Here. Imagine your average three year old human child, something around three ft or a meter tall, probably covered in jam. Now imagine that child trying to get off the ground with a pair of wings. They have to be pretty big wings. Welcome to the plight of the Andean condor, species name Voltore griffiths, the heaviest flying bird in the world, weighing in it up to
thirty three pounds or fifteen kilos. They keep their heavy bodies in the air with some of the longest wings in the world. Their wingspan can range over ten ft long, that's over three meters. There are only a handful of birds currently living on our planet that have larger wingspans, and they're all pelagic birds. Polagic birds being seabirds that soar over the open ocean for weeks at a time,
such as albatross, petrols, and shear waters. As far as we know, the largest bird ever to fly was the polygornous sandersy, which lived twenty five to twenty eight million years ago and was twice as large as the biggest bird living today, with a wingspan of twenty four ft or over seven ms. The seabirds can accomplish this thanks in part to the literally uplifting winds that flow over oceans.
The Indian condor, however, mostly relies on up drafts high in the Andes Mountains across much of western South America. The problem with being such a huge bird is that it makes getting off the ground or even flapping those giant wings in flight a bit of an ordeal. Soaring is easy once they're up in the sky, and that's mainly what Andian condors do. They just float like hang gliders in the air currents, sometimes surveying the ground for dead animals to eat as it's a scavenger, and sometimes
just having a nap. But this means that taking off is the most costly part of the bird's overall energy supply, a sign Tists have always known that they spend very little time flapping their wings, but a study published in July in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found the Antian condors flap their wings a sum total of almost never. Not only did the researchers find that the colossal birds only flap their wings around one percent
of their total flight time. They discovered a bird could fly for five hours and more than a hundred miles or a hundred and fifty kilometers without flapping them once. The research team found that weather didn't affect how much flapping the condors were doing. Study co author Hannah Williams, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior,
said in a press release. This suggests that decisions about when and where to land are crucial, as not only do condors need to be able to take off again, but unnecessary landings will add significantly to their overall flight costs, all of which means that Indian condors must understand how to use thermals thermals being invisible patterns and bubbles of air moving all around in the atmosphere to their advantage, and they must understand this much better than scientists previously
gave them credit for. Today's episode was written by Jesselyn Shields and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other high flying topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Brain Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio. Or more podcasts to my heart radio, visit the iHeart Radio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.