The Flight of a Falcon

An oblique view of the flight-track of a peregrine falcon taken from the paper "Comparing bird and human soaring strategies" by Zsuzsa Akos, Mate Nagy, and Tamas Vicsek (Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, 105, 4139-4143, 2008.  arXiv:0902.0312v1 [physics.bio-ph]).  The altitude and location of the bird were tracked by fitting it with a miniaturized GPS device.  The red and yellow parts of the track correspond to when the bird was climbing (mostly on thermals), and the blue parts to when the bird was falling (gliding).  The grey background is a satellite image of the terrain.