At the end of the deceleration phase, the falcon dropped its legs, spread its toes and finally spread its wings as it approached the falconer. The falconer, however, was close to the falcon at the end of the dive and could see that, during the deceleration phase, the falcon held its wings in a cupped position, apparently with a high angle of attack and therefore high drag. During all three phases, the dive angle was nearly constant or increased during the deceleration phase, and the falcon made no changes in its body shape that were obvious through the tracking device telescope except to reduce its wing span as it accelerated. 2, and decelerating with a mean value of -0.95 times gravitational acceleration. The constant-speed phase lasted no more than a few seconds, and the falcon then began a deceleration phase by increasing its drag further, this time by factors of 1.7-3. The falcon then began a constant-speed phase by increasing drag by a factor of 1.3-4.8 while still 100-350 m above the ground in most dives. During the first (acceleration) phase, the falcon accelerated to speed limits between 52 and 58 m s-1 in the seven fastest dives, evidently with minimum drag, because its accelerations were close to those predicted from theory for minimum drag. The falcon controlled its speed during the dives, rather than simply falling from the sky, and the dives had three phases. The dives started at altitudes up to 500 m above the ground and were inclined at angles of 17-62 degrees from the horizontal. ![]() An optical tracking device recorded the three-dimensional paths of 11 dives by a 1.02 kg gyrfalcon, trained to dive to a falconer.
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