How swifts control their glide performance with morphing wings
Gliding birds continually change the shape and size of their wings(1-6), presumably to exploit the profound effect of wing morphology on aerodynamic performance(7-9). That birds should adjust wing sweep to suit glide speed has been predicted qualitatively by analytical glide models(2,10), which extrapolated the wing's performance envelope from aerodynamic theory. Here we describe the aerodynamic a