The speed of the wind through his tail feathers makes a characteristic chirp sound. When the male comes within 10 feet of the female, he opens his wings and tail feathers wide, straining with all his might to pull up. By accelerate, I mean sprint, wings flapping at 200 beats per second, heart rates reaching 1,260 beats per minute until they hit 60 miles per hour, then they tuck their wings and plummet, torpedo-like, into a near-vertical dive toward the ground.
#Display pilot smart reminder zip
These little guys zip 130 feet into the air, then accelerate into a dive. The courtship display of Anna’s hummingbird males is worth a play-by-play description.
Instead, these tiny birds fly across an ocean in a day because this is what they must do to breed. Yet, hummingbirds do not get diabetes, and no one knows why. It stands to reason these guys would spill barrels of glucose into their urine and develop raging diabetes from day one, even without the stress of migration turning their metabolisms inside out. Additionally, a hummingbird’s post-prandial serum glucose peaks at a whopping 740 mg/dl their fasting serum glucose only goes as low as 300 mg/dl. If we humans were to endure such weight swings twice a year, we would be metabolic messes. If you make it far enough to guzzle some recovery drink, Florida-nectar-style, you will be a mere shadow of your former self, having lost half your body weight in a single day. Sometimes birds are so exhausted they simply fall out of the sky. Did you catch that? The amount of energy needed to propel a human 50 feet up a ladder pumps those bird wings through 500 miles of flight. Then off you go, flapping your two-inch wings endlessly, transitioning from glucose to fat metabolism at the flip of a switch, making the trek on the caloric content of just one and a half gram of fat. This is a close thing, considering you will be so stuffed you will often leak globules of fat through your skin. First off, you must lap up enough nectar and energy to double your fat stores but still be able to fly. This is what I mean by recalibrating your perspective. This is a solo journey, 20 hours straight of do-or-die flight across an ocean, alone in the world. Through storm and wind, blazing day, and dark of night, this hummingbird does not travel as part of a flock. However, the wee ruby-throated champion makes its flight straight across the Gulf of Mexico, 500 miles-nonstop. True, other birds migrate longer distances, including ruby’s cousin, the rufous hummingbird, which keeps flying all the way to Alaska. The ruby-throated hummingbird travels from its wintering grounds in the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico to its breeding grounds in the eastern United States and back again each year. With brains that make up 4.2 percent of their body weight (compared to the measly two percent of body weight our brains make up), they have clearly got brains and brawn. Studies bear out the fact they can remember each flower they have visited. Hummingbirds are the only birds capable of flying backward due to a remarkable figure-eight wing stroke that has been studied by the military for developing flight technologies. One Cornell Lab of Ornithology researcher stated this is roughly equivalent to us eating 300 hamburgers per day to keep up with metabolic demand. That is less than a marshmallow, about the weight of three paper clips we can safely say, “dinky.” Despite their diminutive size, they have monster metabolisms, eating up to three times their body weight per day in nectar and insects to replenish the calories they burn. Yes, our work is exhausting, but not as exhausting as the work day some of our friends in the animal kingdom experience. When your stamina flags, one of the best ways to boost motivation is to recalibrate your perspective. Alas, performing at the ragged edge of ability, efficiency, performance, and limitation as we do, it is no overstatement to say we experience hard days.
Then as now, we do not know what will walk in the door, what surgical skills will be required of us, what complicated treatments must be instituted, or what conclusions must be determined and deftly explained.
By Holly Sawyer, DVM Ruby-throated hummingbirds fly 500 miles nonstop from Mexico the eastern United States by themselves.įrom the time of James Herriot to modern 24/7 practice, some aspects of veterinary medicine will never change.
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