African or European?

Sometimes I feel obliged to make the obvious joke, just so that nobody else has to embarrass themselves. So it is with this paper.

I'll look at it properly later, but for the moment it suffices to say that they look at the flight speed of different birds, and try to explain that by allometry (shape) and other things. The important point is that they miss of one species: the fully-laden swallow.

Shame on them!

Reference: Alerstam T, Rosén M, Bäckman J, Ericson PGP, Hellgren O (2007). Flight Speeds among Bird Species: Allometric and Phylogenetic Effects PLoS Biology 5(8), e197 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0050197