BR: v7

CLEVER SONATIONS:   Birds don’t just make bird sounds from the syrinx in their throat.  They can also make sounds with different parts of their bodies like their feet, wings, feathers or their bills.

CLEVER SONATIONS:   The “body sounds” are called vocalesees. The hummingbird makes a chirp that comes from the strangest place.

CLEVER SONATIONS:   The female Anna’s hummingbird has an interesting courtship display.  She flies straight up 10,000 feet and then power dives down.  

CLEVER SONATIONS:   This hummer’s dive down is quite impressive. He hits twice the body length speed of the peregrine falcon which tops speeds of 200 mph in its dives. This little air-borne wonder accelerates faster than any other animal hitting g forces over 10g’s  which can cause a person to pass out.

CLEVER SONATIONS:    At the bottom of the dive, Anna’s hummingbird swings upward and makes a loud chirp.  No one knew how it could make such a loud chirp because its syrinx– its voice “box”– is too large for it to do it.  

CLEVER SONATIONS:  It was discovered that the hummer fans its tail feathers out in 60 seconds on the bottom upswing of the dive.  This causes the tapered feathers to vibrate rapidly like the reed of a clarinet making the chirp sound.  

BIRD LEGS!:   Have you ever been to an amusement park where people are carrying around those great big turkey legs?  Birds are different than us.   We have our upper leg–our femur– with a large muscle and our calf with a muscle going all the way down our leg.

The bird has the upper leg muscle–the “drumstick” part that we eat in turkey leg–and the rest is done by tendons.

BIRD LEGS!:   If a bird wanted to sit on a pole in a snowstorm, the placement of their leg muscles in the upper leg keeps them from getting very cold.

BIRD LEGS!:   When a bird flies, its legs are thicker on the bottom.  It causes less air resistance.  This makes them more streamlined as they fly.

BIRD LEGS!:    If you see a hawk closing its claws, most of the muscles to do this are in the upper part of the leg.  Tendons from the upper muscle go down the thin part of the leg to operate its claws.