Development of flight performance in the brown booby

How do birds acquire flight skills after fledging? This issue is important, as it is closely related to variation in the duration of offspring care, the causes of which remain unknown. In this study, we raised hatchling brown boobies, Sula leucogaster, and attached an acceleration data logger to each bird at fledging to record its movements. This allowed us to quantify precisely the time spent flapping, gliding and resting. The duration of foraging trips and proportion of time spent gliding during flight increased with the number of days since fledging, whereas the proportion of time spent in flight decreased. This indicates that brown boobies gradually acquire efficient flight skills during the post-fledging period, which might be the proximate cause of the long post-fledging care period in this species. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to record precisely the ontogeny of flight behaviour in birds.