If John Burt could have one wish, it would probably be to sprout wings. Instead, he has the wings of the songbirds he studies and the wings of the planes he flies — both full-size and model-size.
“I’ve always loved airplanes and flying,” says Burt, who earned his doctorate in psychology at the UW and is currently doing post-doctoral work in the lab of Michael Beecher.
His passion for flight started the way it starts for many people — making model airplanes with his father when he was a kid. Only in Burt’s case, the models didn’t get abandoned when adolescence struck; they just kept getting more sophisticated. By the time he was in high school Burt had graduated to radio-controlled gliders.
“A radio-controlled glider is a fairly simple contraption,” Burt says. “It usually has two or three control surfaces so that you can maneuver it around. The challenging thing about flying a glider is trying to keep it up in the air because you’re depending on upward air drafts and then landing it in one piece.”
Seattle, with its many hills, provides a good environment for flying gliders. Burt likes to take his to the bluff in Discovery Park, where he can indulge his love of aerobatic flying.
But Burt spent three years at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, where the flat terrain makes launching a glider difficult. That’s where he began experimenting with planes powered by electric motors. He currently owns several of these, with wingspans ranging from 2 feet to 13 feet. Some of the planes he builds from kits, but increasingly, he buys them ready-made.
“It’s actually very hard to find a kit anymore,” Burt says. “During the ’90s, a period of wealth, the whole industry of model airplanes became very popular, so all these eastern European countries started manufacturing and selling them ready-made. These days, countries like Russia make the very best planes.”
Burt is a techie kind of guy, having spent the time between his undergraduate and graduate studies as a computer programmer. So once he got going on motorized planes, it wasn’t long until he was installing video cameras with a wireless transmitter on some of them. He then had a video receiving box that transmitted the video signal into a laptop computer. So, while the plane flew, Burt controlled its movements by watching what was coming in through the video sequence.
The video was also stored for later playback. If you’d like to see what it would be like to ride on one of Burt’s planes, go to http://www.syrinxpc.com/downloads/jmbsmodels.htm and click on the download at the bottom of the page.
Given Burt’s love of planes, it was natural for him to take flying lessons. He hasn’t yet gotten his pilot’s license, but he has been able to fly solo a number of times. It was also natural for him to focus his graduate studies on birds, though that wasn’t what he first chose.
“I thought I wanted to study whales,” Burt says. “Then a friend of mine said, ‘Hey, you should talk to my boss. He’s looking for a grad student but he studies birds.’”
So Burt talked to the boss, who convinced him that birds would make good study subjects.
Back with creatures of flight, Burt flourished. But he doesn’t study the birds’ wings; he studies their songs. Currently, he’s involved in a research project led by Beecher with the goal of understanding how birds learn to sing. The research group brought in baby song sparrows and hand raised them, then exposed them to adult “tutor” birds under different conditions.
Once again Burt’s technical expertise came in handy as he wrote a “virtual tutor” software program to be used with some of the birds. The program allows the birds to hear four virtual tutors — singing from different speakers — who interact with one another and with the tutee according to a simple set of rules.
The song bird experiment is pure science, Burt says, but it does have implications for how human babies learn to speak. And working on it and other studies of birds’ songs gave him an idea for a project that combines his academic interest with his personal interest.
“I started thinking it would be really neat if you could put a microphone on a model airplane and fly it over a forest and record the sounds that were coming from the forest,” Burt says. “It seems like kind of a weird idea, but one of the really crucial areas in conservation research is just being able to identify what species of animals are in the forest.”
Usually, he says, researchers go out in rainforest areas and spend “days and days” hacking out a trail system. Then they do sampling — walking around with a microphone and a tape recorder and recording the sounds in the forest at different locations. That enables them to go back to the lab and identify all the species that were singing and calling and so forth.
“If you could just fly over the forest, you wouldn’t have to go in and hack a trail and all that,” Burt says. “So that’s been a focus of my hobby lately.”
The difficulty in attempting such a thing is the noise the plane makes, which would drown out the bird songs. Burt has been experimenting with building electric powered gliders, using the motor to get the glider up to some altitude, then cutting the motor out for gliding and recording. He says it isn’t ready for prime time yet, but he thinks it’s worth pursuing.
As hobbies go, Burt’s isn’t the cheapest one around. The best model planes can cost between $500 and $2,000, though it’s possible to buy good ones cheaper than that. Burt set aside flying for the most part when he was in graduate school because of a lack of money and time. But he came back to it as quickly as he could. Asked what the motivation is, he struggles to find the words:
“It’s just . . . it’s hard to describe. Being able to control this thing that’s flying through three-dimensional space, and control it well and bring it down without having it crash into something is just a thrilling kind of thing.”