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Hummingbirds
Despite their size, hummingbirds are the most active birds on earth. They rarely stumble and may even continue to feed during storms.
Now, thanks to new research, science is beginning to understand how they fly smoothly in all kinds of climates. Want to know?
Hummingbirds are forerunners in spring and summer, but they don't have much time to stop. These birds have no sense of smell and are busy stealing nectar for their metabolism, which is also the fastest of all warm-blooded animals on the planet.
All the energy they possess allows them to perform incredible physical feats. Hummingbirds flap around 80 times per second, breathe 250 times per minute, and experience more than 72,000 heartbeats every hour.
In addition, some endure great migrations, such as the more than 800 kilometers non-stop across the Gulf of Mexico or the 4800 between Alaska and Mexico.
Because they are hungry, hummingbirds cannot afford not to feed during storms, nor can they make aerial mistakes. They continue to feed during strong winds and rains.
Now biologists have stopped to study how they perform their aerial acrobatics in all kinds of weather conditions.
The gaze of science
A new study by a Columbia University research team investigated how hummingbirds fly so precisely under normal conditions. They placed the birds in a 5.5-meter tunnel, equipped with eight cameras to track their movement, and projected patterns on the walls to see how they steer to avoid collisions.
The goal was to find out how they avoided collisions and found that hummingbirds use the environment differently than insects to take the right course.
Bees, for example, judge the distance by seeing how fast an object moves beyond its field of vision because according to researchers, nearby objects pass faster than those farther away on the horizon.
But when the researchers simulated the effect on the tunnel walls, the hummingbirds did not react. In contrast, birds seemed to depend on the size of an object to assess its distance, a strategy that might help explain why they collide less frequently than bees.
When objects grow in size, they can indicate the amount of time until they collide even without knowing the actual size of the object. This strategy can allow birds to avoid collisions with greater precision over the wide range of flight speeds they use.
In addition to that, the researchers also found that hummingbirds use a technique known as "image speed" to determine their flight altitude and adjustment based on the vertical movement of the patterns on the tunnel walls.
Watch the video!
In a recent experiment, a biological research team sought to understand why hummingbirds fly so well in wind and rain. To do this, birds were filmed with high-speed cameras at the Animal Flight Laboratory at the University of Berkeley, California.
More research
For the experiment, they used Ana's hummingbirds, a common species along the Pacific coast. Once the birds learned to feed on an artificial flower, they were moved into a wind tunnel and beaten by winds of 10 to 30 kilometers per hour. Their reactions were recorded with a high-speed camera. In another experiment, they created a false storm inside a plexiglass cube to record how they tried to feed during the storm.
Watch the video!
While most birds flap their wings up and down, hummingbirds flutter near the flowers by rapid fluttering from side to side in the shape of an eight. As the video reveals, they can adapt to the wind by twisting their bodies to accommodate the flow of air, a strategy that burns more energy but lets them continue to fly. Their agile wings and tails also help them maintain their position, at least enough to keep eating.
The simulated rain also did not seem to dissuade the hummingbirds from feeding. Not only did they ignore the rain as they fed, but they stopped dry to shake once fed.
These small birds are definitely amazing and have great survival skills. Did you imagine that?
Thank you for reading 😊
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