Useless Bird Facts
The average hummingbird weights less than a penny. It has a body temperature of 111 degrees and beats its wings more than 75 times a second. Its newborn are the size of bumblebees and its nest is the size of a walnut. The hummingbird is the only bird that can fly backward.
When attacked, the petrel, a giant bird of the Antarctic, repels its enemies either by regurgitating food in their faces or by squirting a jet of viscous oil from its nostrils with a force great enough to known down a person.
Bald eagles are not bald. The top of their head is covered with slicked-down white feathers; from a distance they appear hairless.
An eagle can attack, kill, and carry away an animal as large as a young deer. The harpy eagle of South America feeds on monkeys.
The penculine titmouse of Africa builds its home in such a sturdy manner that Masai tribesmen use their nests for purses and carrying cases.
The female knot-tying weaverbird will refuse to mate with a male who has built a shoddy nest. If spurned, the male must take the nest apart and completely rebuild it in order to win the affections of the female.
The tailorbird of Africa makes its nest by sewing together two broad leaves. It uses fiber as the thread and its bill as the needle.
In one year, hens in America lay enough eggs to encircle the globe a hundred times.
Males bowerbirds build and decorate nests to be used exclusively for mating. They ornament the nests with flowers, bits of string, berries, feathers, even pieces of glass or brightly colored papers. After these decorations are in place, the male bowerbird paints the entire nest with blueberry juice that has extracted by pressing the berries in his beak. After the courtship and mating have taken place, the nest is deserted and a separate one is constructed for rearing the young.
The penguin has an apparatus above its eyes that enables it to transform salt water into fresh. The penguin takes only one mate during its life and is such a conscientious parent that it will, if necessary, starve to death in order to provide its children with food.
The albatross drinks sea water. It has a special desalinization apparatus that strains out and excretes all excess salt.
The optimum depth of birdbath water, says the Audubon Society of America, is 2 and a half inches. Less water makes it difficult for birds to take a bath; more makes them afraid.
Ducks will lay eggs only in the early mornings.
An ostrich egg can make eleven and a half omelets.
The bateleur eagle of Africa hunts over a territory of 250 square miles a day.
A bird sees everything at once in total focus. Whereas the human eye is globular and must adjust to varying distances, the bird's eye is flat and can take in everything at once in a single glance.
Utility workers in the desert of southern California have developed a unique system for finding gas leaks. The desert areas of South California are heavily populated by a bird known as the turkey buzzard, which has an exceptionally keen sense of smell. The utility companies add a substance to the natural gas (which is odorless in its pure state) that gives it a smell that arouses the turkey buzzard's mating instincts. Whenever there is a break in the line, vast numbers of excited birds are drawn to the spot. By looking for the clusters of these anxious birds, linemen are able to determine the precise location of the leak.
Flamingos are not naturally pink. They get their color from their food, tiny blue-green algae that turn pink during digestion.
In 1880 there were approximately 2 billion passenger pigeons in the United States. By 1914, the species was extinct.
Parrots, most famous of all talking birds, rarely acquire a vocabulary of more than twenty words.
A robin has almost 3,000 feathers.
An ostrich may weight as much as 300 pounds. Its intestinal tract is 45 feet long.
A bird “ chews” with its stomach. Since most birds do not have teeth, a bird routinely swallows small pebbles and gravel. These grits become vigorously agitated in the bird's stomach and server to grind food as it passes through the digestive system.
The ruby-throated humming bird moves its wings at a rate of 200 wing beats per second.
Hens do not have to be impregnated to lay eggs. The rooster is necessary only to fertilize the egg.
It may take more than two days for a chick to break out of its shell.
The bird with the largest population in the world is the red billed quela, an inhabitant of Africa. To farmers red-billed quelas are known as “feathered locusts,” for they travel in flocks that number in the millions and leave devastation behind them whenever they land on crops. At last count there were approximately 10 billion of these birds in existence. The only other bird with nearly so great a population was the passenger pigeon, which in 1840 had a population of about 9 billion. As a result of excessive hunting by man, the passenger pigeon was extinct less than eighty years later.
There is approximately one chicken for every human being in the world.
In 1956 a white leghorn chicken belonging to a farmer in Vineland, New Jersey, laid an egg that weighed more than a pound. This is the largest chicken egg recorded to date.
There are no penguins at the North Pole. In fact, there are no penguins anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere. All seventeen varieties of the bird are found below the equator, primarily in Antarctica.
90 percent of all species that have become extinct have been birds.
More turkeys are raised in California than in any other state in the United States.