Hey it's me Destin,
welcome back to Smarter Every Day.
If you're like me, when you think of hummingbirds
you think of cute little animals that go around
drinking out of flowers and everything is
happy and beautiful right?
Well it's not.
They're actually savage little beasts
that will kill each other to get what they want,
which is nectar.
This lady named Ramona called me from Grant Alabama
and let me know that she has all these beautiful
feeders setup in her back yard so she can take
photos of hummingbirds any time she wants.
It's awesome, but Ramona has thrown the
supply and demand curves out of whack.
It's a good thing because she's boosting
the population, but they now depend on her.
So today on Smarter Every Day we're gonna do
what Ramona wants.
We're gonna take the Phantom Miro and get
some awesome slow motion of these hummingbirds
interacting and fighting around the feeders.
And then, see how much of a risk we can make them take,
all on slow motion.
You're getting Smarter Every Day.
[music]
The way these things work is pretty interesting,
because they have to have food at all times.
It's like a supply on demand kind of need right?
So hummingbirds defend a territory of about
a quarter of an acre.
Ramona has artificially boosted the supply in the
local area which means they can peacefully
coexist as long as that supply is there, right?
But what happens if we start to eliminate the supply?
So think about this ecosystem in terms of economics.
You've got a set supply of food and a set demand,
number of birds you have to feed.
What happens if we remove the food from the system,
we should be able to drive up the price of that food,
thereby increasing the amount of risk that the birds
want to take in order to get to the food.
That's exactly what we're gonna do.
We're gonna manipulate an ecosystem artificially
in order to get awesome slow-mo footage.
Let's do that right now.
Let's get Smarter Every Day.
No nutrients here.
[music]
[unintelligible]
[laughs]
It works.
[music]
[laughter in background]
Shoot, that's crazy! [laughs]
Alright we're putting feeders back out.
There you go.
Well I hope you enjoyed this episode of Smarter Every Day.
This was brought to you by Audible.com.
So if you want to support Smarter Every Day
go check out an audio book on audible.com/smarter.
The one I recommend since we're in Grant Alabama
which is in Alabama, which is where Harper Lee is from,
is called To Kill a Mockingbird.
She wrote one book,
that's the only one she published,
and she won a Pullitzer Prize for it.
That's pretty awesome.
Anyway it's been banned in a lot of places because of the racism
and there's some bad words and things like that,
but it's a very good book and it teaches things on multiple levels
so if you want to support Smarter Every Day,
audible.com/smarter, To Kill a Mockingbird.
Thank you very much.
Please subscribe if we earned it.
Appreciate your time,
and Ramona, thank you for your hummingbirds.
Appreciate the use of your hummingbirds.
(Ramona) Thank you.
(Destin) Thank you so much.