Birdology: Adventures with a Pack of Hens, a Peck of Pigeons, Cantankerous Crows, Fierce Falcons, Hip Hop Parrots, Baby Hummingbirds, and One Murderously Big Living Dinosaur

by Sy Montgomery

even fly upside down.

(Adjusted for body length, the Allen’s is the fastest bird in the world. Diving at 385 body lengths per second, this hummer beats the peregrine falcon’s dives at 200 body lengths per second—and

Hawks, roadrunners, crows, jays, squirrels, opossums, raccoons—even dragonflies and praying mantids—eat them. Bass leap from ponds to gulp them whole. Fire ants and yellow jackets sting babies to death in the nest. Flying adults get impaled on the stamens of thistles. They are killed by unseasonable freezes—and by other hummingbirds. They spar with needle-like bills, but most hummers kill rivals by chasing them away from nectar sources. The losers starve.

They die from infestations of mites. They get blown off course on migration and run out of energy. They fly into spiderwebs while hunting for bugs, or while gathering the silk for nest making. They fall to the ground with their wings bound, mummy-like, in sheets of sticky silk, unable to fly or feed.

Cat. Hummingbirds also smack into our windows and are hit by our cars. (They are so attracted to red they may kill themselves hitting the glass pane separating them from a red flower in a greenhouse. They will chase red cars. A woman with a scarlet Chevy Suburban reported that immature hummingbirds would probe for nectar in the cracks of its hood.) And because they are all lung and so small, hummingbirds are extremely vulnerable to our pollutants and poisons. Brenda has seen all too many hummingbirds poisoned by common garden pesticides, for which there is no antidote.

resting heart rate of five hundred beats a minute, revving to fifteen hundred a minute when, one day, it flies?

Feathers are among the most complex structural organs found in nature. Nothing of comparable dimension is stronger. They are made of keratin, the same as a human’s fingernails, a horse’s hooves, and a rhino’s horn—but the keratin in feathers, due to a difference in molecular structure, is even tougher. A typical bird’s feathers outweigh its skeleton. Feathers define a bird. By trapping and moving air, feathers protect the bird from cold and wet, and they enable it to fly. But each feather is, itself, largely air, with a stiff central shaft that is light and hollow and attaches, beneath the skin, to a muscle. Like each scale on a reptile, each feather on a bird can be raised or lowered as needed. The shaft divides the feather into two broad vanes on each side, which consist of parallel branches called barbs. At right angles to the barbs are interlocking branchlets called barbules. Hundreds of pairs of tiny barbules on each barb fit together like tiny strips of Velcro and give the feather its web-like quality. The barbules have small hook-like processes called barbicels. And on the barbicels of some feathers are even tinier branchlets, microscopic hamuli, which allow even more air to be trapped in the feather. When birds preen—running their beaks through their feathers, as these babies do after Brenda ruffles them—they are rezipping the Velcro of these minute connections.

Caught in the feathers, air gives birds their warmth and their flight; in hummingbirds, air even gives them their color. Their jewel-like radiance—emerald, ruby, amethyst—comes not from pigment, as in most birds’ feathers, but from air.

Except for the flight feathers on wings and tail, the top third of hummingbird feathers lack barbicels and hamuli. Instead, they have elliptical structures called platelets (utterly different from the clotting cells in our blood of the same name) filled with microscopic air bubbles. The shape and thickness of the platelet and the amount of air determine the color...

The color on the throat, or gorget, and head of a male is particularly spectacular. The platelets on these feathers are like flat mirrors, and light reflects in only one direction. This is why the gorget of a male ruby-throat, for instance, dazzles in sunlight but may look black in shade. Hummingbirds know this. By carefully adjusting his position in relation to the o...

Today our babies only hint at the colors they may one day command. Young hummingbirds look like females, whose drabber plumage...

At a feeder, a hummingbird extrudes and withdraws the tongue thirteen times a second.

hummingbirds do not sip nectar; they lap it. The tongue is forked, like a snake’s, with absorbent fringes along the edge of each fork, and grooved down the center to withdraw extra nectar through capillary action. The tongue is so long that, when retracted, it extends back to the rear of the skull and then curls around to lie on top of the skull.

(Some woodpeckers, too, have very long tongues—sometimes more than three times the length of the bill—demanding an equally odd storage arrangement when the organ is not in use prying insects from deep holes. In the case of the hairy woodpecker, the tongue forks in the throat, goes below the base of the jaws, wraps behind and then over the top of the woodpecker’s skull, and comes to rest inside the bony orbit behind the eyeball.) With this extraordinary appendage, a hummer can drink its own weight in nectar in a single visit to a feeder.

More than twenty-five thousand species of mites afflict the world’s birds. Some live in the air sacs of canaries, looking like specks of pepper. Others burrow inside the faces and legs of parrots. Chiggers, which also plague humans, beset turkeys and chickens. With piercing mouthparts like those of their relatives, the ticks, the mites feed on the host bird’s blood. They itch, wreck sleep, and can cause feather damage as the bird desperately scratches to relieve the itching. Severely infested birds can develop sores, lose weight, and die from anemia.

“That may be why the bigger one kicked the littler one out of the nest,” Brenda says. Since mothers reuse the old nest if they raise two broods, nest mites are common in a season’s second clutch.

Bird flight is a confluence of miracles: Scales evolved into feathers. Marrow gave way to air. Jaws turned to horny, lightweight beaks bereft of teeth. (This is why many birds swallow stones: to grind their food since they can’t chew it.) Hands grew into wingtips. Arms became airfoils.

Consider the three basic methods of bird flight. The simplest, gliding flight, demands exquisite balance and judgment. Gliding flight exploits passive lift to counteract the pull of gravity. Vultures, hawks, and eagles ride the currents within thermals, rising columns of warm air. Albatrosses and petrels exploit different layers of wind speed above waves. Birds can glide for hours, expending very little energy.

Flapping flight—the way most birds fly—is more demanding still. Achieved by flexing wings at joints in wrist, elbow, and shoulder, it is powered by extraordinarily strong breast muscles. The wings move forward in a downward arc, propelling the bird forward and up. It is similar to the oarsman’s power stroke or the action of a swimmer doing the butterfly. Movement then flows into the upward stroke, a recovery stroke, to start the process anew.

And finally, there is hovering, unique to hummingbirds. No other bird really hovers—kites, storm petrels, kestrels, and kingfishers appear to do so, but only hummingbirds can sustain this method of flying for more than a few moments. Instead of flapping the wings up and down, the wings move forward and backward in a figure eight. During the forward and back strokes, the wings make two turns of nearly one hundred and eighty degrees. The upstroke as well as downstroke require enormous strength; every stroke is a power stroke. Like insects and helicopters, hummingbirds can fly backward by slanting the angle of the wings; they can fly upside down by spreading the tail to lead the body into a backward somersault. Hovering becomes so natural to a...

In most birds, 15 to 25 percent of the body is given over to flying muscles. In a hummingbird’s body, flight muscles account for 35 percent. An enormous heart constitutes up to 2.5 percent of its body weight—the largest per body weight of all vertebrates. At rest, the hummingbird pumps blood at a rate fifteen times as fast as that of a resting ostrich, and that blood is exceptionally rich in oxygen-carrying hemoglobin.

even resting, it breathes 250 times a minute, and its heart pounds at five hundred beats per minute—a hummer must daily visit fifteen hundred flowers and eat six hundred to seven hundred insects.

Food is so precious to hummingbirds that they defend “their” flowers and feeders against all comers. They sometimes even chase away hawks and crows. Their main rivals, of course, for the food are other hummingbirds, and hummers’ belligerence toward their fellows is legendary.

fighting hummingbirds trying to stab each other’s eyes out with their bills. The couple has seen a hummer grab the rival’s bill in flight and, locked in midair, the two birds fall to the ground together—then rise to continue the battle. A male hummingbird may spend one minute in fifteen lapping from a favored feeder—and the other fourteen defending it. But the way hummers usually kill rivals is bloodless. They simply chase the rival bird from food until it runs out of energy. It can enter a state called torpor in which the body temperature, normally more than 105 degrees Fahrenheit, falls to below 70. Torpor can also be caused by chill, and it can take an hour for a hummingbird to rouse from it; during this time, even the most slow-moving predator—even a possum—can take a hummingbird. But if a predator doesn’t get it, starvation will.

A torpid hummingbird may perch next to a nectar-laden flower but be too weak to summon the energy to drink from it.

How does a five-week-old hummingbird know the difference between a deadly hawk and a harmless vulture? The knowledge could be innate. Or it could be the result of careful observation. Hummingbirds are curious and astute observers. Backyard hummers quickly learn to recognize individual humans and approach people who feed them—even if they are not carrying food. (Sometimes they’ll hover at windows to attract a particular person to come out and refill an empty feeder.)

red, a color many flowers sport specifically to attract hummingbird pollinators, as it’s a color bees don’t see.

Hawks

A raptor’s vision is the sharpest of all living creatures. All birds’ eyes are huge in proportion to their bodies.

Vision literally sculpts birds’ every movement: one reason that birds seem to move in such a jerky manner, as cassowary expert Andy Mack explained to me, is that the bird is actually keeping its head remarkably still, thanks to an extremely supple neck, while the rest of the body is in motion, in order to allow it to focus on what it sees in exceptional detail.

In birds of prey, the eyes weigh more than the brain. The two eyes are twice as large as the brain itself. They need to be huge.

Like all birds, raptors have not merely two (as we do) but three types of photoreceptors in the eye. Because of this, birds are thought to be able to experience colors that humans cannot even describe. Their retinas, unlike ours, contain few blood vessels. Instead, a thin, folded tissue called pectin, unique to birds, brings blood and nutrie...

Most birds, like most mammals, have a single area within the eye of perfect vision, called the fovea, where cone cells, which detect sharp contrast and detail, are most concentrated. A raptor’s eye has two foveae. One is for lateral vision, the other for forward vision. A human eye has two hundred thousand cones to each sq...

wider field of vision

better distance perception than other birds.

Most birds’ eyes lie at the sides of the head so that when they look at something, they use one eye at a time. With forward-facing eyes, raptors have binocular vision like ours, but better. Fields of view of the left and right eye overlap, allowing the brain to compare t...

“These birds don’t think the way we think,” Nancy tells us. “They don’t learn the same way we do.” Because of our differing brain circuitry, birds capture at a glance what it might take a human many seconds to apprehend. For all birds, but especially these, seeing is not merely believing; seeing is knowing. Seeing is being.

A falcon is at once the stupidest thing you’ll ever deal with—and the most instinctively developed thing you’ll ever deal with.”

But instinct is what lets us love life’s juicy essence: instinct is why we enjoy food and drink and sex. Thinking can get in the way of living. Too often we see through our brains, not through our eyes. This is such a common human failing that we joke about the absentminded professor or the artist so focused on his imagined canvas that he walks into a tree.

The Buddhists say there really is nothing else, because now is timeless; now is everything.

Pigeons

Timing is also critical.

let them out that late or they’ll be flying through night predators,”

“They start getting nervous when it gets dark.

Hawks. Owls. Winds. Rain. Exhaustion.

pigeons often mate for life,

fly at night.

flew encumbered with miniature cameras to take reconnaissance photos

released from submarines and parachuted from airplanes in...

flew in the jungles of Burma and the deserts ...