Here at Top Comments we strive to nourish community by rounding up some of the site's best, funniest, most mojo'd & most informative commentary, and we depend on your help!! If you see a comment by another Kossack that deserves wider recognition, please send it either to topcomments at gmail or to the Top Comments group mailbox by 9:30pm Eastern. Please please please include a few words about why you sent it in as well as your user name (even if you think we know it already :-)), so we can credit you with the find!
Hummingbirds are a source of simple delight and wonder. It is amazing to contemplate how a bird could be so small. Further, hummingbirds can do things that no other bird can do, such as hovering with wings beating or flying backwards. However, one thing that has not been understood is how hummingbirds can fly through spaces narrower than their wingspans. An ordinary bird can arch their wings so as to reduce their wingspan while remaining flightworthy, but hummingbird wings are not flexible. In flight, a hummingbird’s wings stick straight out from its body, and they do not flex. Nonetheless, hummingbirds do indeed fly through gaps narrower than their wingspans, so how do they do it? Fortunately, slow-motion video has revealed the acrobatics they use.
The study used Anna’s hummingbirds for observation. When these hummingbirds approach a narrow space, such as a hole, they pass through by flying sideways while reducing their wing motion to a flutter. The notion that a bird can willfully fly sideways (as opposed to being carried sideways in a strong wind) is entirely new. Once they’ve done this a few times and are familiar with the hole, they change strategies: they momentarily fold their wings against their bodies to pass through the hole while traveling at a higher velocity, and then resume flight once they pass through.
To the human eye, hummingbirds flying from feeder to feeder appeared as blurs on computer screens monitoring the enclosure, says Badger, now an engineer at Aescape, a therapeutic robotics company based in New York City. But high-speed cameras placed to the side and below the hole showed that the birds first used sideways flight to shimmy their way through narrow gaps. Then each bird switched to diving through the hole.
You can see both these strategies in the video clip below.
Having learn of this new in-flight acrobatic move, engineers designing drones and other flying robots could find ways to use it so that such probes can also navigate narrow spaces. However, as a scientist (rather than an engineer), I’m just left in awe of this previously unknown skill that hummingbirds display.
Comments are below the fold.
Top Comments (March 3, 2024):
From Denise Oliver Velez:
From my Black Music Sunday tribute to Miriam Makeba, Commoner1 shared a touching memory of Makeba coming to their home.
From Angela Marx:
Walter Einenkel writes in his front page post West Virginia’s schools might be forced to pay for ‘in God we trust’ signage:
Just the idea of a state requiring the phrase "In God we trust" to be on the wall in every classroom in it's public schools is wrong-headed, because of the 1st Amendment.
randym77 provided the PERFECT response:
Does it say how big it has to be? Can they just glue a penny to the wall?
bwhahahahahaha!
Top Mojo (March 2, 2024):
Top Mojo is courtesy of mik! Click here for more on how Top Mojo works.
Top Photos (March 2, 2024):
Thanks to jotter (RIP) for creating it and elfling for restoring it!