In an 1892 football game against its arch rival Yale, Harvard unveiled a football formation called the “flying wedge” also known as the “flying V.” In this formation, the entire team lined up in a V shaped wedge around the player with the ball and headed down the field. The logic was that no defender could reach the ball carrier until the players forming the sides of the wedge were knocked out of the way, which was difficult to do since the V shape allowed each player to help the man in front of and behind him. Although illegal to use in football today, the flying V is still the basis of many football plays. It is the most common and most effective formation used in the game of rugby, it is still used by military tank and armored units, and the flying V was a play used by the Mighty Ducks hockey team in the popular Disney movies.
Each fall here in Inman, KS, USA the skies fill with honking geese leaving the nearby wetlands heading for local wheat and stalk fields to feed. For days there will be so many in fields within ear shot of town that their squawking fills the air even when no geese can be seen. It’s like an old-World War II movie where wave after wave of fighter planes and bombers cover the sky. The Vs of geese are all shapes and sizes; some perfectly shaped, some haphazard, some fly straight as an arrow, some meander back and forth across the sky like weeds in a stream, and some seem so close together it’s hard to tell where one V stops and the next starts. But they all had one thing in common; they flew in some sort of V formation.
Several years ago, while thinking about the dynamics of this flying formation, I contacted Helen Hands, who was then a Kansas Dept of Wildlife and Parks biologist, who shared with me from her wealth of knowledge as the waterfowl specialist at Cheyenne Bottoms.
One theory suggests that this V formation is nothing more than a way for the birds to stay in better visual contact with each other and to avoid losing stragglers as the flock covers the vast distance required during annual migration.
The more widely accepted explanation deals with aerodynamics. It seems everything that flies, be it beast or machine, produces some amount of turbulence with its wings, known as “upwash” and “downwash,” causing “drag” as it moves through the air. However, a second set of wings correctly positioned behind and to one side of the first, benefits from a reduction in drag caused by that set of wings in front of it. We know this as “drafting,” a ploy used by racecar drivers to reduce the drag on their own car, thus using less fuel. What I didn’t know is that in a wedge of flying geese, each bird benefits slightly from the bird behind it also.
A link on the website www.aerospaceweb.com explains the aerodynamics involved in a V of flying geese. As commonly thought, the front bird as leader of the pack, works harder than the ones behind it. However, according to this website, each bird helps dissipate the turbulence caused by the bird in front of it, so the leader as well as each subsequent bird also gets some help from those behind it. This means that in actuality, the back two birds work harder than most of the flock since they have no followers. The
bottom line is that birds flying this way don’t flap their wings as hard or as often, their muscles work less and their heart rates are slower than birds flying solo. Research shows that a group of 25 or more birds in a V formation can fly 70% farther than if flying alone.
We have all noticed that the lead bird in a wedge of geese changes periodically and is replaced by another. This website suggests that the trailing 2 birds do the same since they also work a little harder than most. Helen told me the timing of these replacements is probably determined by the age and physical fitness of the individual geese plus wind speed and direction, among other factors. She said that migrating geese often travel as family groups, the pair and their offspring from that year, so the number of geese in any particular V is possibly determined by the size of certain family groups traveling together.
Once again, as usual, it appears that God’s creatures had this flying V thing figured out long before even Harvard, and furthermore, judging from what I see as I gaze skyward around here each fall, it’s still legal for geese to use it! By the way, do you know why one side of a V of geese is always longer than the other? That’s because there are more geese on that side!……Continue to Explore Kansas Outdoors.
Steve can be contacted by email at [email protected]
