>April 15, 2003
>Inviting Humans to Sprout Wings and Soar
>By JAMES GORMAN
>
>It's one thing to know birds, another to join the flock in the air. Some
>scientific consultants on the film "Winged Migration," a documentary on the
>great travels of birds, had the chance to fly with the creatures they study
>on an ultralight aircraft that was the moviemakers' primary tool.
>
>Jacques Perrin, the French producer and director of the movie, who speaks
>English with a certain poetic license and an accent reminiscent of Jacques
>Cousteau, said that when scientists landed, they were speechless. "They
>don't say so splendid words," he said with a light in his eyes. "They cry."
>
>That's easy to believe. Even a viewer in the theater has to be moved by the
>almost palpable presence of birds in flight. You can see the flight muscles
>of the Greylag geese, hear their breathing and their calls, see them in
>their element thousands feet above the ground and just a few feet away from
>the camera. An ornithologist who did this in reality would need a heart of
>stone to return to earth with dry eyes.
>
>"Winged Migration," which was nominated for an Academy Award for documentary
>feature, is, like Mr. Perrin's English, more poetic than precise, with
>minimal narration and music that sometimes threatens to soar off into the
>stratosphere.
>
>But the images of birds, gained over four years by more than a dozen
>cinematographers, are simply astonishing. (The film opens in New York on
>Friday at the Paris Theater; other dates and locations can be found online
>at www.sonyclassics.com /wingedmigration/home.html.)
>
>Mr. Perrin said an ultralight aircraft modified to hold a pilot and
>photographer was the most important tool in getting such images.
>
>He said it was absolutely terrifying to be sitting on the small machine on a
>metal frame added ahead of the pilot - except when there were birds. "When
>you are with birds, you are not scared," he said.
>
>With the aircraft, the same sort of plane used to lead whooping cranes
>raised in captivity on migration routes, the cinematographers could be
>treated as members of the flock. In fact, they trained some birds -
>including geese, pelicans and swans - by letting them fix on the ultralight
>as chicks so that they thought of it as an adult bird and would follow it
>when it took off. These birds were used to lure wild flocks into the air.
>
>The ultralight was not easy to fly, Mr. Perrin said, nor was it always
>comfortable for filming. Sometimes at 10,000 feet a bird would land on a
>cinematographer's lap and have to be nudged off with one hand, while he held
>a heavy 35-millimeter film camera in the other. One rule was absolute: no
>filmmakers with vertigo need apply.
>
>Ultralight aircraft crashed seven times, Mr. Perrin said, although no one
>was seriously injured. "If I have a good friend," Mr. Perrin said, "I don't
>give him this aircraft."
>
>The filmmakers used other flying machines, including a motorized parachute,
>gliders and balloons. Mr. Perrin said they tried unsuccessfully to use small
>remote controlled model aircraft. But they succeeded with a land-crawling
>remotely controlled robot with a camera, which could move, slowly, into a
>flock on the ground. On water, the teams used boats, including a very large
>one lent by the French Navy.
>
>"Winged Migration" follows a year in the life of birds in North America,
>Europe and Asia, in Africa and the Middle East, in Antarctica and the
>Southern Ocean. The film crews went to Iceland and Kenya, Nebraska and
>Kosovo, Senegal and Greenland, Vietnam, Peru and many other locations.
>
>At times, poetic license was extended. Cinematographers filmed Canadian
>hunters shooting snow geese, but they also used images of fowl tumbling from
>the sky that were actually birds doing excited acrobatics as they came to
>land. In the second instance, the gunshots were added in the studio.
>
>In addition, one shot of birds walking through oil was done on a constructed
>set. The oil was milk with vegetable color. And in another scene when crabs
>were attacking young birds, something that occurred naturally, Mr. Perrin
>said, the filmmakers snatched the young chicks away before the crabs got
>them and substituted a piece of fish, so that the final feeding of the crabs
>seen on screen was not actually on a bird carcass.
>
>Nonetheless, Mr. Perrin said, the wild birds filmed were truly wild. They
>flew when they chose to fly. Sometimes they were lured into the sky by the
>trained birds, and sometimes they voted with their feet and stayed on the
>ground. Sometimes they took off when the film crews weren't ready.
>
>The pictures of birds in the air, showing their formations and mode of
>flying are the most significant for scientists, who can see flight
>mechanisms at work, and for their beauty.
>
>In Africa, for instance, there are scenes of birds in countless numbers
>wheeling and turning in unison like an instantly shifting Escher drawing.
>The images look unreal.
>
>Dr. Henri Weimerskirch of the National Center of Scientific Research in
>Villiers-en-Bois, France, a scientific consultant on the film, said it
>appealed to both scientists and nature lovers. "Some people look at it as a
>great view of the way the animals are living," he said. "Others look at it
>more as a poem."
>
>Dr. Weimerskirch also did some research in collaboration with the
>filmmakers. In October 2001 he published a paper in Nature that took
>advantage of the pelicans trained to follow the aircraft by attaching
>monitors to check their heartbeats. He showed that they saved energy by
>flying in formation. He said he would report soon on similar work with
>swans.
>If the movie has more poetry than data, it still satisfies a deep hunger for
>a certain kind of knowledge: the desire to see. It is hard to observe birds
>closely in their element, and that is why the market is so good among
>birders for binoculars and telescopes. In watching the film, no optics are
>required.
>
>Dr. Weimerskirch said he had been working with birds for 20 years, studying
>the energetics of their flight. But, of course, he had never flown with
>them. "It was incredible to be with the animal itself," he said. "There," he
>said, "you can see exactly how it works."
>
>Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company