The package provides methods for predicting flight range of birds based on their physiological characteristics. This is an R implementation of Flight program provided by Pennycuick.

Installation

Install the development version from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("BMasinde/FlyingR")

Time-Marching computation

In brief, the time-marching computation computes the flight range of birds in short time intervals (6-minutes). Within this time period chemical and mechanical powers are held constant during which fat and protein are consumed to sustain flight. Because of the reduction in weight, the chemical and mechanical powers are recalculated for the next time period and the distance flown is incremented to previous time-interval’s distance. And this process iterates until fat mass is depleted giving the maximum possible range under the time-marching computation.

Stop-over mass calculator

Birds migrate long distances between breeding and wintering grounds. In the majority of cases, it is not possible to cover these distances at a go, and therefore, stops are required to rest, feed, and restore both fat and protein Lindström and Piersma 1993; Klaassen 1996; Kaiser 1999; Schwilch et al. 2002; Pennycuick 2008). However, research on stopovers (e.g., Lindström 1991; Lindström and Piersma 1993)
focuses on fuel (fat mass) restoration. As such, the stopover mass calculator used in the package FlyingR, is based on maximum fuel deposition rates (FDR), given by Lindström (1991), separately for passerines and non-passerines (Equations , , and ). This is not an optimal solution as it does not account for protein restoration. In addition, there are reservations about using lean body mass; body mass minus fat mass (Pennycuick 2008).