The way I think about it, smaller birds have less weight and less wind resistance. Shouldn’t that mean they would be faster?
In: 7
It’s probably a bit easier to visualize if you look at cars rather than birds. Let’s pretend you could make a bigger car by gluing a number of small cars together.
Say you have a car that has 100 horsepower and it weighs 1 ton, and you glue nine of them together like so:
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Acceleration depends on the power-to-weight ratio, and since your big car weighs 9 times as much and has 9 times as much power, it’s still going to accelerate the same as the small car.
However, the top speed depends on the power and the wind resistance. Your glued-together big car has 9 times as much power, but it’s only 3 times as wide, so the wind resistance is only going to be about 3 times as large. That means the top speed is higher.
As you increase the size of your vehicle, the frontal area grows far slower than the combined power of the engines.
The same happens when you increase the size of a bird. It may have 8 times as much weight and muscle power, but the frontal area of the bird will only grow by a smaller factor.
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