I built a plane to prove you can’t beat a cheetah!
Remarkable story of Scots professor who took to the air to study big cats
IN 1965 a Glasgow University veterinary graduate called Craig Sharp decided to find out how fast nature’s ultimate sprinter could run. So he stood with a stopwatch in the back of a Land Rover trailing a lump of meat and an adult female cheetah obligingly chased it.
The rudimentary speed trial conducted on a windless day on a Kenyan farm found that, at full pelt, a cheetah could run 220 yards in seven seconds – the equivalent of 64 miles per hour – and it entered the annals as the most reliable analysis of the big cat’s awesome athleticism.
Half a century later, another Glasgow University veterinary graduate, Professor Alan Wilson, has gone to rather greater lengths to chart the cheetah’s capabilities.
They involved building an aeroplane in his garden shed, getting a pilot’s licence and spending ten years developing tracking collars with astonishingly accurate GPS systems to fit to cheetahs on the hunt.
His findings rewrite the book on the world’s fastest land animal, revealing much of what we thought we knew about them was wrong. Indeed, the headline discovery is that it is not the cheetah’s flat-out speed which makes it such an effective killing machine but how rapidly it can stop and change direction.
Its manoeuvrability, not its sprint, is what keeps it in fresh meat.
Now the extraordinary work of the intrepid Scottish vet who studies cheetahs by flying 1,000ft above them in Botswana is to be featured in the BBC series Big Cats.
The three-parter features footage of 31 of the 40 cat species, including the elusive snow leopard, a seagull-hunting bobcat and a puma which feeds on penguins.
Capturing the snow leopard on film two and a half miles above sea level in the Himalayas brings tears of joy for cameraman Hector Skevington-Postles and director Anna Place. But few cats capture the imagination like the cheetah and that powerhouse of muscle packed inside its sleek frame.
Thanks to Professor Wilson’s pioneering studies, we know cheetahs have four times the acceleration power of Usain Bolt – the fastest human recorded – and over short distances would leave even a Ferrari in their wake.
We know the levels of G-force at work as they brake and change direction would snap mere human bones and that, contrary to popular belief, they do not typically chase prey down over dusty plains but instead over scrubland strewn with obstacles.
Rarely, as they hunt, do they even approach speeds of 64mph.
But equally fascinating is the story of the 53-year-old at the forefront of the quest to unlock the secrets of the much misunderstood sprint champion of the animal kingdom.
A keen athlete as schoolboy growing up in Busby, Renfrewshire, he trained hard and, by the time he was a student at Glasgow University, was clocking up 100 miles most weeks.
His dedication reaped rewards. In 1984, aged 20, he ran the Glasgow Marathon in 2 hours and 17 minutes, one of the fastest times ever recorded by a Briton of that age.
The more he raced, the more he wanted to learn about the biomechanics of running faster and reducing the risk of injury – and that study soon transferred to fourlegged runners such as greyhounds and thoroughbred racehorses.
Cheetahs, perhaps, were the only logical progression.
Today the study of movement among some of nature’s most impressive athletes has become his life’s work.
He says: ‘I like understanding how things work, be it taking the back off the television or taking my car to bits or trying to work out how the body works – it’s all the same.’
ON a visit to London Zoo eight years ago Professor Wilson saw his first cheetah. At the time the biomechanics professor at London’s Royal Veterinary College (RVC) was helping a PhD student with research on the creature but, as he watched, mesmerised, the Scot realised he should be studying cheetahs too.
He remembers: ‘They had amazing smoothness, grace and power. Just stunning to watch. It was just so lovely to see these animals moving so quickly and yet apparently so effortlessly.’
The problem was that studying cheetahs in the wild was notoriously difficult. Not only did they move very quickly, but they ranged across vast areas. Even if you were lucky enough to find a cheetah, keeping it in your sights in rough terrain – especially after dark – was virtually impossible.
Enter the aircraft – a self-assembly job which took shape over 18 months in Professor Wilson’s garden shed in Hertfordshire.
The quest to update his fellow Glasgow graduate’s findings on the cheetah was under way.
Professor Wilson says: ‘It took a certain level of foolhardy confidence to build a plane. You can buy a kit and then modify it so myself and a couple of colleagues built it in my garden shed at home and I went and learned how to fly.’
What emerged from the shed was a single-engined aircraft with enough room only for the pilot because the second seat had been replaced with a bank of gadgetry dedicated to monitoring animal movements.
After tests in the UK, the aircraft, its trailer and a Land Rover were shipped to Walvis Bay in Namibia before being towed 800 miles to the Okavango Delta in Botswana to track cheetahs.
The idea is to tranquillise a group of the animals and fit them with ultra-sensitive collar tags which record movement at 250 times in a single second. The technology combines high accuracy GPS with sensors including gyroscopes and accelero-meters which give precise readings on speed and position.
This data is transmitted over a radio link to an antenna in the wingtip of the aircraft flying overhead, which feeds the information into the onboard computer.
All a little more high-tech, then, than standing in the back of a Land Rover with a stop watch.
Professor Wilson says: ‘The most memorable moment for me was when we first got the collar data from a wild cheetah. You have this mythical animal that you have video clips of running very quickly, this acceleration, turning and you can see every step, every twist and turn.
‘That exquisite detail in the data showed us what they were doing out there in the bush and there was nothing like that had been measured or seen before.’
Yet the measurements confounded expectations. Professor Wilson had expected to find that, in the wild, cheetahs ran faster than the 64mph achieved by the adult female in 1965.
He says: ‘This was just one tame cheetah on three runs in Kenya and that was the sole true data. We thought, well, they must go a lot faster in hunting. Let’s go and measure this in wild cheetahs.
‘But we found the exact opposite. Of course they go fast, but in terms of hunting they run at around half their maximum speed and the reason for that is critical in hunting – they have exquisite levels of acceleration and manoeuvrability.
‘It’s like a winger in rugby, they don’t actually need to run fast in a straight line, it’s about being able to move, being able to change direction and stop quickly. Cheetahs have amazing agility and grip that allows them to do this very quickly.’
AFTER tracking more than 500 hunts, the top speed recorded is just 58mph. If they have more in the tank, then they almost never use it.
Professor Wilson’s conclusion is that cheetahs’ prowess as sprinters across flat ground is a by-product of their athletic agility, but it is not what gets them kills.
A further misconception is that of cheetahs running around in daylight on vast open plains, bringing down antelope and other prey by outsprinting them.
We believe that, suggests Professor Wilson, because that is the only
behaviour that, thus far, has been possible to film.
But the evidence from the aircraft suggests most hunts take place in scrubby terrain where there is rarely any need for cheetahs to reach their most impressive speeds.
While based predominantly in Britain, where he is head of the RVC’s Structure and Motion Lab, father of four Professor Wilson takes off several times a year – rather like a veterinary version of Indiana Jones – for field work in southern Africa.
There he leaps into the plane he built from scratch to track not only cheetahs, but lions, leopards, wildebeest, zebras, antelopes such as impala, tsessebe and gemsbok, African wild dogs and hyenas.
Does he worry about spending so much of his time around possibly hungry big cats?
‘Cheetahs are interesting in that quite a lot of them are kept almost as house pets,’ he says.
‘I wouldn’t really be bothered by a cheetah. You wouldn’t have the same worry with a cheetah as you would with something like a leopard or a lion even though people have been killed by pet cheetahs on occasion.
‘But even if you get a lion coming into camp it’s unlikely it’s actually going to attack you, it doesn’t perceive you as food. I would be much more concerned about an elephant or a buffalo than a lion.
‘Provided you act sensibly and appropriately it’s a pretty benign environment.’
In episode three of Big Cats, screened on January 25, some of the most extraordinary cheetah footage ever captured will be aired. Slow motion film taken from a high speed buggy laced with meat gives a prey’s eye view of the daunting spectacle.
The cheetah’s long tail whips from side to side to keep it balanced as it twists and brakes, using its claws as running spikes to provide grip and facilitate changes of direction.
Another chase filmed from the plane finds a cheetah in pursuit of an impala.
Agility wins the day as the zigzagging prey is brought down by the superior athlete.
‘My involvement in the BBC thing is very much to try to excite and enthuse people about science,’ says the professor.
This week Professor Sharp, who conducted the original speed trials on a cheetah called Pritchelou in 1965, paid tribute to his younger colleague’s more painstaking approach.
He said: ‘Alan and I both, 50 years apart, sought to measure times an adult cheetah took to cover measured distances. So in that sense we’re similar.
‘But mine involved measuring a straight run a cheetah did every day to get a chunk of meat. Alan used highly sophisticated GPS collars transmitting data to him in a light aircraft.
‘Data moreover that was being recorded from wild cheetah engaged in real hunts of gazelle in the bush itself – with all the exceedingly fast evasions and dodges of the gazelle and all the irregularities of the ground and of the bush plants.’
NOW an emeritus professor of sports science at Brunel University in London, he added: ‘I have no doubt that many of Alan’s cheetahs, with a wee bit of familiarising, could run faster than mine – under equal conditions!’
He said one ‘unforgettable’ memory of Pritchelou was the ‘hugely loud purr’ she gave when she got hold of the meat – or indeed any food, including the scones with cream and strawberry jam she would steal from the dinner table.
‘She could creep up extremely quietly,’ said the professor.
As for his fellow academic, Professor Wilson’s ultimate plan is to fit collar tags around the prey as well as the predator.
Analysis of both sets of data will allow his team to unlock a question central to the survival of the chaser and the chased: just how much better than your prey do you have to be catch it?
But that is for the future. For now, the next adventure is a field trip in Botswana next month to tranquillise some zebras from a helicopter with a dart gun and change their tracking devices.
‘Well, you wouldn’t want life to be too boring,’ laughs the professor.
Episode two of Big Cats is on BBC1 on January 18. The third episode, featuring the cheetahs, airs a week later.