Flight Artists
High-speed camera images of the tropical butterfly Idea leuconoe (above) and the great tit (below).
rhododendron bush, he stands stock-still for a whole minute, his camera five centimetres from a leaf on which there is a tiny wasp or bee - the ex-sports teacher is not sure which. ‘Doesn’t matter. It’s the film that matters, after all.’ Then, abruptly, the insect flies off. De Vaan stops filming and examines the result. He deletes many frames on the spot, keeping only the moment of take-off. ‘But it’s fun that you can just do this straightaway on the camera’ says De Vaan. ‘Hey, look, it looks as if it pushes against the leaf just before taking off.’ How the hoverfly accelerates Course participant Sita Wignand would very much like to film the golden hoverfly, which once hovered in front of her and then suddenly disappeared. ‘It turned out to be watching me from behind, and when I turned around, it flew round to behind my back again. I am very interested in how it accelerates and stops. But before I can film that, I think I need to know more about the behaviour of hoverflies.’ Wignand has been cultivating the necessary patience during the course. She waits beside a couple of little blue flowers just as long as it takes for a fly to come along. ‘I hope the footage will be in focus.’ The film project attracted some youngsters too: 11-year-old Femke Gerritsen from Oosterbeek persuaded her father to take the Casio course with her. Femke likes taking nature photos with her single-lens reflex camera. She is standing in her miniskirt and colourful tights, checking on her camera screen whether she has a bumble bee in focus. Her best film of the day is some footage of a peacock butterfly in flight. The slow motion shots enable you to see that the butterfly first raises its wings and only takes off when they are
right back down again. What is Femke’s reason for taking part in the project? ‘Just because I really enjoy doing it.’ Lentink is satisfied with the success of the project. And no matter what the motives of the participants are, all the material will be special, he says. ‘In many cases, we do not know what animals do when they fly. That is something we have simply never been able to watch. Now everyone can observe it from their own angle and make new discoveries. That gives the participants a new perspective on Dutch nature, and I benefit from it as well. The films will give us an overview of what is flying around in the Netherlands, and how it flies. I get images that I would never have got hold of otherwise. That will also inspire new research questions: about things like how a wing moves, as well as questions about social interaction. For example, we saw on a high-speed film how wasps bump into each other in the air, how hoverflies fight, and how bees look into the camera when they fly past. In science you need very many films of the same thing to be able to prove anything. The people who makes these short films for us get the fun side of making nice discoveries without the hard graft.’ Info: www.flightartists.com W
‘In science you need very many films of the same thing to prove anything’ Wageningenworld
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