I did some bird respiration animations many years ago. Their origins are deep in the past when I read a description of airflow through a bird’s lungs in a biology text book and thought, “That can’t be right”.
I did some thinking and, later, some research and found out how air actually flows through the avian respiratory system.
I wrote some Flash based animations and published them here. Search for John McAuley on the page that I linked to. There are three Flash animations above the paragraph with my name. I did those!
Of course, Flash is pretty much dead these days. You might even need to explicitly install Flash to see the animations. So… many years, ago I did the JavaScript/SVG animated version that you see on this page.
The animation starts small so you can see the layout of the animation with respect to the actual bird. You are looking from below the bird. The mouth is on the left. The trachea runs back from the mouth, splits into the secondary bronchi which enter the lungs from below. The labels tell you which parts are which.
The check boxes and radio buttons at the top of the image will change the animation. Hover over them to see their effect. Click on them to make them sticky. The check boxes can be checked or unchecked at any time.
Check the Bigger box to see the arrows and labels properly.
Click here for a full page version.