Hummingbirds are truly high-performance birds.
They are adapted to get the fuel they need to run, which is flower nectar.
And all their systems are tuned on a razor edge to support that function.
Let's learn about the racecars of the bird world - hummingbirds.
Food
The most important thing to understand about
hummingbirds is their incredible need to eat.
If you see a hummingbird, it's probably eating.
Here's why.
An adult human needs to eat about 2,000 calories per day.
Let's call that thirteen and a half pounds of watermelon.
A lot of watermelon, but it's doable.
A hummingbird is much, much smaller and it only needs 3 to 7 calories per day.
Doesn't sound like much, but a hummingbird weighs 2 grams, less than a penny.
If you scaled a hummingbird up to human size (which would be terrifying, by the way)
it would need to eat 150,000 calories per day.
Or to put it another way, that human-size hummingbird needs to find and eat 1,000 pounds
of watermelon every day.
Imagine how society would be different if every single human needed to acquire and eat
one thousand pounds of watermelon every day to avoid dying.
There would be no art or Youtube or conversations because everyone would be finding or eating
watermelon.
Same with hummingbirds.
Each bird spends all day trying to find or defend food sources.
Hummingbirds have almost zero social structure because they are either eating... or finding...
or defending food.
Going back to the watermelon, this is not eating a thousand pounds of watermelon and
gaining weight.
This is just the amount of watermelon that you would need to eat every day just to survive
to the next day.
By one estimate, hummingbirds need to eat once every 15 minutes to survive.
Why do hummingbirds need to eat so much?
Because they have the highest metabolism of any bird.
When hummingbirds are flying, their heart can beat 20 times per second.
They BREATHE 4 times per second.
Hummingbirds' metabolism is so high that they go into mini-hibernation to avoid starving
to death overnight.
Their body temperature drops.
Their heart slows down.
Even with this extreme energy conservation, they still lose 10% of their body mass overnight.
Flower nectar is a good source for energy, so hummingbirds can drink up to five times
their body weight in nectar every day to fuel their flying.
On the other hand, nectar is mostly water and sugar, so they can add protein and nutrients
to their diet by catching bugs.
The upside of their constant quest for food is that hummingbirds are important pollinators.
Pollen sticks to their head as they move from flower to flower, so they help disperse the
types of flowers that they feed on.
Flight
Hummingbirds are famous for their ability
to hover.
This gives them quick access to flowers so they can drink and move on.
Hummingbirds are not the only bird that can hover, but their wings work in a unique way.
They trace a figure-eight pattern in the air that pushes air downwards in a vortex, then
pulls their wings out of the way to push down another vortex.
Their wings beat up to 80 times per second.
Hummingbirds are able to do the figure-eight flight because they use different bones than
most birds' wings.
Most birds have a bone structure that flaps at the shoulder with their arm bones.
Hummingbirds have short upper arms and use their hand bones to support the wing.
This gives them increased mobility as they move their wing around.
Because of this, they are the only birds able to fly backwards.
Nests
Males use their bright colors to impress females.
Their shiny feathers change color depending on the angle, looking brilliant when viewed
head-on, but fading to black from other angles.
Because they aren't social, the male and female are only together briefly before they both
go back to finding food.
But first the female builds a nest, usually out of spider silk or some other soft material,
and camouflages it with lichens.
Hummingbirds are the smallest birds, and unsurprisingly they also lay the smallest eggs.
The smallest hummingbird egg is about the size of a coffee bean.
She lays one or two eggs.
Babies need the mother to bring them food as they finish developing.
That's it for hummingbirds.
I hope you learned something today that made you go "Hmm".
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