Abstract: The study of scattering characteristics of bird targets is the theoretical foundation for the performanceanalysis of an avian radar system. This article first analyzes the scattering characteristics of bird targets by means of a statistical model based on experimental measurements to estimate the radar cross section (RCS) orderofmagnitude of a single bird and a flock of birds. Then it introduces in detail the system architecture, detection performance and algorithm of the avian radar experimental system for flying bird detection. Finally, flying bird target trails and correlative information are extracted from avian radar image sequences collected during outfield experiments, which verify the feasibility of bird detection with radar, and some prospect of algorithm improvement for reducing false alarm and missing alarm is proposed after an analysis of different experimental results.

Key words: birds, radar cross section, radar, detection, false alarm