A recent study demonstrated that the ‘Andean condor’—the world’s largest soaring bird—could cover huge distances with minimal wing flapping. To find this out, scientists attached special recorders, called ‘daily diaries,’ to eight condors in Patagonia to track their flight. The results showed that these birds flapped their wings only 1% of the time during more than 250 hours of flight, mostly just during takeoff. Researchers were surprised to find that one condor flew over 100 miles in five hours without flapping its wings at all. Professor Emily Shepard, a study co-author and biologist at Swa…