Flight
Level flight is relatively slow. Maximum sustained speed is 14 m/s (about 30 miles per hour). Non-flapping phases are often interspersed throughout the flight. Changes in direction can be extremely quick, probably helped by the bird's long tail.
Read more about this topic: Black-billed Magpie
Famous quotes containing the word flight:
“One man’s observation is another man’s closed book or flight of fancy.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“Fear of error which everything recalls to me at every moment of the flight of my ideas, this mania for control, makes men prefer reason’s imagination to the imagination of the senses. And yet it is always the imagination alone which is at work.”
—Louis Aragon (1897–1982)
“What a cunning mixture of sentiment, pity, tenderness, irony surrounds adolescence, what knowing watchfulness! Young birds on their first flight are hardly so hovered around.”
—Georges Bernanos (1888–1948)