The ability to move through the air in any direction you wish,
to cross continents and oceans,
to range over forests and deserts and mountains,
all this birds have been able to do for 150 millions years.
But they won't the first or indeed the last in the skies.
We are setting out to explore one of the most astonishing stories in the natural world.
The way in which animals manages to rise up from the surface of the Earth,
and colonise the air.
From the dazzling aerobatics of the insects...
to the majesty of ancient winged reptiles.
The splendor and agility of birds...
and the sonar guided precision of night flying bats.
Flight has been the key to the success
of some of our Planet most remarkable inhabitants.
To analyze theirs spectacular skills, we will use the latest technology.
And we will travel around the world.
From the jungles of Borneo to the fossils filled rocks of China.
And the Cloud Forest of Ecuador.
We will take you into the air...
and travel with animals as they fly.
Evidence for the very beginning of this astonishing story
can be found close to home in The Fens of Cambridgeshire.
Here live creatures that have an ancestry stretching back millions of years.
Nobody know exactly how the first flying animals in the world evolve,
but there are creatures alive today, that can take us back
to those far distance remarkable times,
and they live surprisingly under water.
Looking down through the surface to the riverbed,
is like traveling back in time over 320 million years.
It was then, in an age long before even the dinosaurs evolved,
that creatures like this first appeared in the waters of the Earth.
It's an insect.
A ferocious predator with jaws like a mechanical grab.
It seems unlikely that this animal ancestors
were among the first creatures ever to fly.
But this one is not yet adult, it's a larva,
and it doesn't spend all his life in the water.
It has another life and another body above the surface.
Early one morning it climbs up a reed.
A split appears in its skin, and a very different looking creature begins to emerge.
It has four lumps on its back, that might perhaps ancestry
have become either gills or protective armor plates.
But now they develop into something very different.
Wings.
It has two pairs of them.
Liquid from its body is pump-down along veins to stretch them tight.
As they dry in the sun, they harden.
The watering dragon has become the Dragonfly.
And the four wing depurates that he uses to get into the air,
is the earliest that we know.
Imprints of such wings have been found in rocks that was lay-down
on the bottom of ancient lakes and streams.
This specimen is about 150 million years old.
And at nearly 300 million years, this is the oldest complete wing yet discovered.
Ancient and modern wings share a structure that is strikingly similar.
So today's Dragonflies are amazingly living fossils that can show us
how the very first flyers overcame the pull of gravity, and took to the skies.
Their wings are marvels of natural engineering.
But to see how they lift the Dragonfly into the air,
we need to slow the action down.
In principle, it looks very simple,
each wing beats-down, pushing on the air below,
so lifting the Dragonfly up.
But each beat also creates another air current
that lifts the Dragonfly in a very different way.
And I can demonstrate it, using this strip of paper to represent a wing.
If I blow across the top of it, it will rise.
Watch.
That is because the faster air moves, the lower its pressure.
So I created a lower pressure above the wing,
and in consequence it was sucked upwards.
The problem for a flying animal is to recreate that difference in air speed.
The way the Dragonfly does this is remarkable.
As it moves through the air, we can see that it twists its wings at different angels.
On the powerful down-beat, it holds them at a slight upward angle to the air flow,
and this produces an extraordinary effect above the wing.
It create a swirl behind the leading edge, which spins the air round,
increasing the speed of the air current over the top of the wing.
And with just a tiny increasing speed generates a significant upward force.
Lifting up the wing and the Dragonfly.
The Dragonfly can then change the direction of its wing beats
to propel it forwards as well as upwards.
Remarkably, a Dragonfly can beat each of its four wings independently.
And that enable it to perform an astonishing variety of maneuvers.
It can hover.
It can glide.
It can even fly backwards.
For maximum power, it beats both pairs together,
and can make really sharp turns.
So the very first Dragonflies were able to extend their territories far and wide.
And as more insects joined them in the skies,
the Dragonflies had the skills to be deadly aerial hunters.
The ability to fly brought great advances to those early insects.
It enable them to find food, to escape from predators,
and particularly important, to travel to new territories in search of a mate.
Damselflies like their close relations Dragonflies,
have remained virtually unchanged for millions of years.
Mating can be quite complicated when both partners can fly,
and these were among the first kind of animals that had to deal with that problem.
The blue color of this one shows that it's a male.
To attract a female, a male must have something to offer her.
A territory.
He chooses a stretch of water, that is likely to contain plenty of food for his offspring.
Then he guard this territory against any rivals.
Until a female flies in and joins him.
He must now grab her before she changes her mind,
in mid air if necessary.
He uses claspers at the tip of his abdomen to grip her behind her neck.
Amazingly, the pair are able to coordinate the beats of their eight wings.
They may mate in the air, or choose a secluded patch where they be safe from predators.
They then fly around the territory, laying their fertilized eggs.
Flight enable insects to invade part of the Planet
that until then had been uninhabited.
The air. and they flourished.
So, 320 million years ago the skies flaunt with flying insects.
But those early four wing forms were destined to produce
a all range of spectacular highly specialize flyers.
The need to lay eggs in water, tied the first Dragonflies
to streams and ponds like these.
But then around 20 million years after their arrival,
a new kind of flying insect appeared with no such ties to water.
To find spectacular proof of their success, we headed next to Borneo.
To find the next chapter in our evolutionary story of the flying insects,
I have come to Borneo.
The very first flyers had two pairs of wings,
now we looking for their successors.
One group of creatures adapted that original
four wing design with such success,
that they diversified into the most numerous
and wide spectrum of animals on the entire Planet,
and you can find some of the most spectacular examples down there in the rainforest.
Not all insects are hunters, some are strict vegetarians like this one.
This it is the land living equivalent to that underwater monster,
the Dragonfly larva.
But this larva instead of catching little fish and water fleas,
munches wood pulp.
The trouble is that wood pulp is not very nutritious,
and this creature, has to eat it for at least a year,
before is this size, which is full grown.
But then this larva will turn into an adult,
which is equally monstrous.
Emerging from beneath the ground, where it is lived and fed as a larva,
is a beetle. one of the biggest in the world.
The Atlas Beetle.
Males like this one are armed with long horns,
powerful weapons with which to compete with rivals for a mate.
It now spend most of his time above the ground,
margined its way through the undergrowth, where it feed
on tree-sap and fallen fruit.
This hefty powerful creature may not look as if it could fly.
But it can.
At key moments in its life he takes to the air
to look for new sources of food, and of course, a female.
All this burrowing and munching around could injure delicate flight wings,
so beetles have harden the front pair to form this pair of protective covers,
and the delicate flight pair are stored away in safety underneath.
To see how the wings are folded away beneath their covers,
we need to wait for take-off.
As it flaps, sprung engines click-open and the wings are stretch to their full size.
The working wings create lift in just the same way that the Dragonfly wings do,
and the front wings, protecting them as a covers, are held out to the side.
And their shape does give a little extra lift.
So it clear that this is a really are all clumsy flyer.
Landings can be clumsy too.
And now those fragile wings must be carefully packed away beneath of their covers.
They guided by a line of tiny hairs of the base of the abdomen.
These grip the wings and help push them into position.
The beetle dose it with all the care and precision
that a skydiver uses when packing away his parachute.
Once in a new territory, it will stake out a fresh source of food,
and then defend it until a female arrives.
The beetle way of life proved astonishingly successful.
There are over 370,000 different species of beetle so far discovered.
Unbelievable figure.
So early on, the beetles manage to fly as much as they need to,
with just one pair of wings.
And then around 57 million years ago,
came another key development in the history of flight.
A new type of insect appeared with two pairs of wings
that became in effect huge billboards.
Wings that are perhaps the most dazzlingly beautiful of all.
Butterflies.
Butterflies live on nectar which they collect from flowers.
Like Dragonflies and Beetles they also fly to find a mate.
But the way they beat their colorful wings is significantly different.
This lovely creature has two pairs of wings,
but he has in effect turn them into one.
It done that quite simply, by overlapping the larger front pair over the smaller hind pair,
so when the front pair beat-down, they automatically press down lower pair.
The lower pair themselves don't have the muscles to beat-down,
but just enough strength to return up.
A Butterfly's overlapping wings compare to the size of their bodies, are enormous,
around 10 times the size of other insect wings.
Because the wing is larger, each beat can generate a huge amount of lift.
So to stay in airborne, a butterfly need to flap less often than other insects.
But that slow wing-beat, also enable it to make rapid and unpredictable changes of direction.
And that allow Butterflies to fly in that zigzag erratic way,
which make them so difficulty to catch, if you are butterfly collector,
or more importantly, a predator.
The combined front and hind wings of butterfly, not only constitute
very effective flying mechanism, they can also carry messages.
In fact, they carry some of the loveliest advertisements in the all of the Animal Kingdom.
Like for example, this beautiful Golden Birdwing Butterfly from Borneo.
The butterfly huge wings provide auspicious canvas
on which they display fantastically elaborate designs.
So, how are these flying advertisements created?
The secret lies in the microscopic structure of the wing surface.
These overlapping scales lined up like tiles on a roof,
have evolved from bristles that were once tiny sensors.
Some contain tiny package of pigment that give the wings color.
Others have a complex structure which split the light,
so that when viewed from a particular angle, it reflects a brilliant iridescence.
There are over 18,000 species of butterfly around the world,
and each has wings with their own distinctive design.
These ravishing colors and delectable patterns, of course,
enable a male butterfly and a female butterfly to know
whether or not they belong to the same species.
And a mature adult ready to mate, can identify suitable partner from surprising distances.
When a male and female eventually meet, they flutter around each other in a ritual dance.
Each is checking out the flying skills and wingspans of the other.
If both past the test, they mate.
The sheer size of butterfly wings, might seem to condemn their owners to a slow,
almost dawdling flight.
But they can be much more efficient aeronauts then you might suppose.
Butterflies may not be able to fly very fast, but astonishingly,
for such frail looking creatures, they can travel for hundreds of miles in search of food.
New discoveries are revealing that butterflies make immense journeys,
and one of the most exciting of this studies
is taking place 7,000 miles west of Borneo, in Europe.
I am joining a research project in the upland meadow of Central Spain,
to look for one of the greaters of all butterfly travelers.
The Painted Lady.
Every spring, Painted Ladies appear in Spain in great numbers.
But Spain is just a stopover.
An international team of scientists are uncovering evidence
of an astonishing journey right across Europe and beyond.
This hugely ambitious project is the brainchild of Dr. Constantise Iovanescu.
Detailed records of when and where Painted Ladies appear
have revealed an extraordinary mass migration.
We were able to collect a huge number of observations
from a more then 60 different countries,
and maybe 35,000 records... -really?
in many people contributing their observations,
and for the first time it was possible to understand
the general pattern of migration all around.
By combining this wealth of data the team are revealing a route map
that spans incredibly distances.
And it begins in North Africa.
Large numbers of Painted Ladies breed in Morocco over the winter,
before setting out across the Mediterranean to Europe.
They then follow the spring bloom north, as the plants
that they and their young feed on, sprout leafs and flowers.
In summer, they appear in Britain and Scandinavia.
But no individual butterfly lives long enough to achieve this huge journey by itself.
Each step is taking by a new generation.
So, this Painted Lady in Britain is the grandchild
of a butterfly that set out from Morocco.
But then, in autumn, all the Painted Ladies vanish.
Do they simply die out? or could that be a return leg to their epic migration?
Searching for an answer to this mystery, has given the project
its most astonishing revelation yet.
And it comes from a part of the team based at
Rothamsted Research Institute just outside London.
The key discovery emerge from a surprising source.
Radar.
Our radar has a vertical pointing beam, and it illuminates a narrow column of the sky above,
like shining a powerful spotlight up at in the sky,
and we are able to detect individual insects as they fly through that beam.
The signal is so detailed it can even help identify the species.
And during the autumn disappearance,
the radar picked up large numbers of Painted Ladies.
They won't dying out, they were on the move,
and they were flying at astonishing heights.
What we find was, that in fact the Painted Ladies were highly abounded,
at heights of three, four, five hundreds meter above the ground.
At this great height, they were invisible to observers down below.
This explained their disappearance.
But the Butterflies had their own very good reason to travel at such altitudes.
One of the benefits of flying at three or four hundreds meter above the ground,
is that the wind speed-air much faster than the air ground level,
so the insects are able to get a lot of assistance from the wind,
and travel much faster then they would in their own powered flight,
and we see these Painted Ladies traveling at 50 or even 70 miles an hour.
As well as measuring the phenomenal speed of their flight,
the radar also revealed its direction.
They were heading south.
So where will they go?
The astonishing answer came from Constantise far-flung network of observers,
and the crucial piece of data was gathered in Africa.
Some exploration in Africa, in October, November,
have shown that there is a huge arrival of Butterflies at that moment. -really?
So, by the end of the summer, the newborn Butterflies in Europe
are start to migrate a little way back to Africa.
Really? -ya.
A final generation riding on high altitude winds makes an immense journey
of up to 3,000 miles to West Africa, in just a matter of days.
Observers on the ground, and radar in the air,
had found proof of an amazing migration cycle.
Just in one year the all cycle is made,
and is the succession of these 6 generations moving about
5,000 kilometer in one direction, and 5,000 in another direction.
This migration, is in fact the longest made by
any insect on the Planet so far discovered.
Some insects face a very different challenge, not fly long distances,
but flying in the dark.
A Light Trap can attract some of the most remarkable of this nocturnal flyers.
Moths.
Moths probably evolve to fly at night to avoid predators.
Their eyes are adapted to low light, but they also use a second, highly developed, sense,
smell.
This is a male Moon Moth.
Moths overlap their two pairs of wings in just the same way Butterflies do,
and this particular moth is very special. it has an extremely short life.
He will only live for a week. it won't even feed.
Its only object is to find a female.
And it does that with these remarkable feather-like antennae.
The female emits a particular characteristic scent,
and with those antenna, the male can sense it from as much as a mile away.
He then take-off and fly upwind, until eventually it find the source.
Moths with their combined front and rear wings, are also excellent flyers.
Some live longer, and so need to fly to find food.
This Sphinx Moth favorite food is nectar.
It can even hover as it drinks.
So, by overlapping their two pairs of wings,
Butterflies and Moths has become very competent flyers.
But there is one group of flying insects that has change
the back pair of wings into something quite, quite different.
Something that enable them to perform the most extraordinary aerial gymnastics.
For the final chapter in our story of flying insects, I'm returning to London.
The urban jungle and its human inhabitants provide plenty of shelter and food
for a particularly adaptable and numerous kind of insect.
Thank you very much. thank you.
An inviting meal like this one, well, I'm quite sure,
very soon attract a flying diner, that is one of the most remarkable
of all insects aeronauts.
It is, of course, a fly.
This particular kind, a blowfly, occurs all over the world.
And its ancestors have been buzzing around for a least 250 million years.
Flies are so common, we tend to dismiss them as just irritating pests,
but their flying abilities are truly remarkable.
Watch what happen if I try and swat this one with the menu.
Slowing down the action by forty times, we can see how astonishingly agile flies are.
It make its escape in the time it takes me to blink my eye.
The ability to twist and turn at such high speeds, and so evade enemies,
has made аlies the global success that they are.
They are the jet fighters of the insect world,
and they owe their maneuver ability not to the shape of their wings,
nor the power of their muscles, but to a set of highly advanced flight sensors.
A fly has its own version of a fighter pilot's instrument panel.
Providing constant updates on speed, altitude and direction of travel.
A fly gathers this flight data through its eyes,
and these are among the best in the business.
They can process visual information arouтв ten times as fast as our own eyes.
But in high speed maneuvers, even a fly's eyes
struggle with one crucial piece of flight data.
The angle of its body in the air and the way it changes.
Information that a human pilot will get from an instrument based on a gyroscope.
And that is essential if you are going to pull off a stunt like this one.
Fortunately, flies not only have eyes to guide them.
They also have a second and even more remarkable set of sensors.
One that is derived from that original four-wing design.
A fly only has a single pair of wings.
The rear pair have been converted into something else.
A tiny club-like appendage known as a haltere.
This surprisingly sophisticated organ alerts the fly for changes
for the position of its body in the air.
As the fly takes off, each haltere begin to beat up and down,
and so fast, it immediately becomes a blur.
But in slow motion, we can see that it swings back and forth like a pendulum.
To understand how the haltere works,
we need to track its movement in the midair roll.
The weighty tip of the haltere has a kind of moving inertia,
so that it remains on the same swinging path as the fly banks.
Now, the angle between the body and the haltere changes,
and the base is put under strain.
This triggers sensors which register the roll.
The fly can then adjust its wing beat to correct any imbalance, however extreme.
New studies into a second remarkable use of the haltere signal
are taking place at London Imperial College.
In the department of Bioengineering, experts are studying Blow Flies
to see if their natural flight mechanics can improve the performance
of man-made flyers, like this drone.
Flies are incredibly maneuverable, and if you look at their performance,
one chasing another one, it's really hardly
any other animal that can match this sort of aerodynamic performance.
Holger has devised an experiment to investigate an intriguing connection
between a fly's halteres and its other key flight sensor, its eyes.
A tiny motor simulate a series of high speed midair rolls.
The way the fly then reacts is recorded on a specialist camera
which can replayed the action in slow motion.
As you can see if you look closely, the head of the fly is maintained level,
the body is rotating, and to maintain level gaze
they have to counter-rotate the head.
Keeping the eyes level is vital if they're to gather accurate flight information.
And the halteres has been identified as the crucial sensor that makes this possible.
Visual system alone will just be to slow, that's where actually the halteres come in.
The halteres are extremely fast in terms of their responses,
and they are immediate, well, signals, that are then sent to the next motor system,
and to the flight motor system, they are the first really
to compensate for any disturbances, and if that has happened,
the visual system is perfectly well situated to cope with the rest.
So, Flies lost a pair of wings, but gain an extraordinary new flight sensor
that made them the most advanced flyers in the insect world.
Flight has enabled the insects as a whole to become an astonishing global success.
There are twice as many insects species,
then there are of all other animals put together.
Theirs is a remarkable evolutionary story that spans over 320 million years.
From the first four-wing creatures that emerge from the water,
to the armour-plated beetles which colonise land away from water.
The иutterflies with their huge colorful wings.
And the stunningly skillful aerobatic flies.
But skill may not be enough, sometimes sheer size counts.
The insects had the skies for themselves for around 100 million years,
but then a new group of animal appeared, animals that could build bigger bodies,
and they were to lift the techniques of flying to even greater heights.
As our journey through time continues, we encounter
the extraordinary pioneers of a new wave of larger flyers.
Monstrous winged reptiles.
Strange feather dinosaurs, whose ventures into the air led to the birds.
And a group of mammals that conquered the pitch-black of the night.
The bats.