May 26, 2020 • 46 mins
If you didn’t already know how amazing hummingbirds are, prepare to learn. Not only do they count among their numbers the smallest bird species, they are also lightning fast and have the endurance of a marathoner and a telethoner put together.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of My
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and
Jerry's flitting around here. Here they're darting to and fro
like a little ruby throated hunter and Emerald and this
(00:25):
is stuff you should know. I saw Jerry. I know,
I heard Jerry, that's all with my own two eyes.
How she doing? Is her hair just completely white? Now? Well,
I mean we were fifteen ft away from each other,
so I couldn't tell. What did you try squinting? I did? Uh?
And I shaved so she didn't even recognize me. I know,
(00:46):
I saw that picture. Man, you look great. Yeah, thanks
so nice. It's just luxurious. Well, the beards coming back already,
huh from the second I shaved it, technically it started
coming back. That is true. Are you one of those
people who say, like, yeah, from the moment we're born,
we start dying. God, you know they're the pits. No,
(01:11):
hungrowing it back at It was just a little, uh,
just a little change of pace. You know. That's good.
Must have felt really weird. Uh, it does still feel
pretty weird at times. Well that's good. Well four days later, yeah, So, Chuck,
I want to talk about something else that's weird besides
the feeling of having just shaved off a beard after
(01:33):
fifteen million years, which, by the way, if you want
to see that picture, you can go to the movie
Crush page on Facebook and see that absolutely. And now
continue the weird thing I want to talk about today, Chuck.
Are hummingbirds. Hummingbirds, Yes, so they are weird, but they're
weird in all of like the most delightful ways. I
(01:55):
love hummingbirds, love them, and I love them even more
now that I know more about him. You just, Grandma,
the air snapped the wings off and popped like you
think a quail doesn't produce much meat hummingbird. I have
like forty of those for dinner at least that might
(02:17):
just be an appetizer. And good luck catching him though,
right they are hard to catch. But I have a story. Um,
there was a hummingbird once that got into my house
and it was for freaking out. It was basically just
smacking its head against the ceiling. I know. It was
very sad. So I got a chair and I just
held my hand up just right by it, and it
(02:39):
stopped freaking out and perched on my hand. I had
a hummingbird perched motionlessly on my hand, and it stayed
there long enough for me to stick my hand out
the window and it flew off. How many how many
years ago? Was this? That was a while back? I mean,
were you a child? No, No, I was I was
(03:00):
a man. I must have smelled great too, because the
hummingbird chose to trust me. But I thought that was
just one of the coolest things ever. That's pretty amazing. Um,
a guy in our neighborhood yesterday got attacked by an owl.
So that's on the other end of the bird human
interaction spectrum. Yeah, an owl or the Jersey devil. It
really apparently it's not uncommon to get attacked by an owl. Yeah.
(03:25):
I mean, we've got a big one that um makes
an almost every evening fly over our backyard to the
big forest behind our yard from across the street, and
we love this thing. But I didn't know that. I
didn't know that they attacked people like this. But it
happens your your neighbor, talking rabbit. I don't have a
neighbor to where it goes. It's an empty house, so
(03:46):
maybe that's why they like it. So No, who was
attacked though your neighborhood. Not a neighbor, but just I
saw it on the neighborhood facebook page. Some guy was attacked.
Like the owl came down and talent his head. It's crazy.
Imagine that that killed. I wonder if the guy was like, oh, look,
because as are huge. I wonder if he's like, man,
I look at that thing. Hey, he's coming at me.
(04:07):
And then all of a sudden, you've got talents in
your skull. Oh my god. All right, stop diverting attention
from hummingbirds. Yeah. So hummingbirds. Uh, they are with the family. Uh.
I had it. I had it earlier and it's really
not hard. Uh truck ala day, truck a delay, roca
(04:31):
lead and they are related to the swift's uh. And
you know hummingbirds, he said, the little bitty fellas. They
weigh between two and twenty grahams. They have those long
pointy noses that they love to stick in flowers. And
they have these wings that and boy, when we get
into the fascinating facts about the hummingbird and is those
(04:54):
little wings, it gets pretty amazing. But one of the
things I'm gonna go ahead and spoil from later and
this this stuff you put together was that what's so
remarkable about about hummingbirds and how they fly is that
they you know, usually when you see a bird fly,
they flap down and that provides their lift. Hummingbirds like,
no way, buddy, you gotta you gotta get that thing
(05:15):
working in both directions, double your pleasure up and down.
That is how a hummingbird is able to hover and
go in reverse and do all those crazy things is
because it's not just flapping, it's flipping and flapping. Yeah,
they're the only vertebrate animal that can hover like a helicopter.
It's like the Blue Thunder of birds. Whenn't that Roy
(05:39):
Scheider movie that was a good one. I think I
wasn't allowed to watch that because there's some sexy stuff
in there. There is the Yeah, the Blue Thunder peaks
in some windows, if you know what I mean. Yeah,
And it came out at a time when I would
watch movies with my mom and she was like, you
need to leave the room. Yeah. I don't think I
was allowed to watch it at first either, but I
(05:59):
think come out of snuck it. Oh, I see what
you mean so um. One of the things that that
makes hummingbirds so well known, aside from their incredible agility
and being the only vertebrate that can hover in midair,
is just the look of them. Because if you've ever
looked at a hummingbird from afar, you're like, oh, that
(06:20):
thing's okay. It's just a kind of a normal looking bird.
And then it just moves and catches the sun like
just right, and all of a sudden, this splash of
metallic jewel like color just crosses its throat and chest,
and you say, the hummingbird is truly great. Yeah, it's amazing.
It's sort of like the butterfly, uh wings and that
(06:43):
if you catch it at the right angle, you get
that that metallic sort of shiny color and it's and
it's sort of for the same reason those gorgets, which
is that uh, that reflective stuff on the upper chest
of the hummingbird, and like the throat area, it's not
actual pigment, it is the structure of the physical structure
of those feathers is little air bubbles inside there that
(07:07):
reflect that light. Right, Yeah, and I'm pretty sure we
I mean, we did an episode on um butterfly wings iridescence. Yeah,
and I'm pretty sure it is the exact same thing
in butterfly wings is in that gorge at that clutch
of feathers in the hummingbird. Yeah, so it not only
reflects it, but also like bulks it up to pretty
(07:27):
neat stuff. So, man, sorry, I guess I'm kind of
flemy today. I don't know why, but um my, apologies
for being flemy. So um. One thing I didn't realize
about hummingbirds is there's three and thirty eight species that
we know of, and all of them are found in
(07:48):
the America's Did you know that. I don't think I did,
But they are found like all throughout the Americas, from
Chile all the way up to a southern Alaska and Canada.
They've got a pretty wide range. But the thing is
that things are so small, so tiny and so um
(08:09):
unable to maintain a decent body temperature that they basically
follow the summer. Yeah, and they all diverged from a
single common ancestor about twenty two million years ago. And
the kind of the cool thing is that they keep
changing and their rate of speciation is really pretty incredible.
(08:30):
It's it's supposedly going to outpace their rate of extinction,
and we're going to see well we won't see it
because we'll be dead in the next forty years. But
but human beings, if we're still around that is, are
gonna see the number of species of hummingbird double to
what we have today. But it's going to be a
(08:51):
few million years, so don't expect that anytime soon. Yeah,
but it is pretty cool just to think that, you know,
they're still in the midst of their evolutionary history and
like right the middle of it. You know, I like
that about them. So UM, you know, being that that
multi varied species all the way from Patagonia up to Alaska. UM,
(09:14):
they have learned to adapt to a bunch of different
niches and habitats, right. So you can find UM hummingbird
species in like sub sea level deserts. You can find
them up in the Andes. There's actually a lot of
different species that live in the Andes Mountains. UM. You
can find the bulk of them in tropical forests, UM.
(09:37):
Around the tropics of the New World. UM. And they've
adapted like really well to their different environments. Some migrate,
some don't, UM, but all of them are very tiny. Yeah,
they're cute little little things. As if you look up
a picture of the bee hummingbird just prepared for one
(09:59):
of the kut this little I mean, it looks like
it looks fake. Yeah, do you know it doesn't look
like a bird could actually be that small without becoming
an insect. It's gonna just collapse into insect form at anymore.
But look it up online. The little b hummingbird from
Cuba ways about one point nine five grams. We don't
(10:20):
get those here in Georgia, the only kind. And I
think how many species are there in the United States,
About seventeen or eighteen that's what I saw, But only
that ruby throated is the one that we're going to
get here on the East coast. Yeah, and and just
to go, like to double that up, man, one point
nine five grams. Somebody did the math, and you could
(10:42):
mail fourteen of those things with one supposed to stamp
in the United States. Just smash them down flat. There's
not right. There's not a single species of hummingbird that
breaks an ounce and wait um, which is to say
that the largest hummingbird species there is the giant hummingbird,
which is kind of a contradiction in terms, it's still
(11:05):
smaller than an Atlantic canary. Wow, the giant hummingbird is
still canary size. So this is a very tiny group
of birds. Well, and this is the stat that gets me,
And this is the one I texted Emily because we
love our hummingbirds like all normal humans. Um, the eggs
of the ruby throated hummingbird that we have here in
(11:27):
Georgia are the size of a p Can you believe that?
Did you look up their um their nests pictures of
their nests. They're gorgeous. It looks like something you'd buy
on Etsy. They look kind of like made of felt.
Because hummingbirds use spider silk. They take old spider webs
and use them as thread to weave like um their nests,
(11:51):
along with plant fibers and leaves and twigs to give
it kind of the spongy, velvety, super cush feel for
their little bit babies velvety mouth feel exactly. So we're
gonna talk a lot about the hummingbird flying and because
it's pretty remarkable. It's one of the most remarkable things
(12:11):
in nature. Like I think it's right up there with
like the chromatophors of the octopus and uh, I was
about to spoil our live show, but maybe I should.
Are we ever gonna be on stage again? I don't know,
but let's just hold onto it just in case. All right,
we're gonna keep that in our back pocket. But the wings,
the wing muscles of hummingbird account to about of its
(12:35):
total body weight. So this thing is all like it
it It never has legs. Day at the gym, it's
always do an upper body and the legs are tiny
and weak, and they really don't walk. I mean, they
can perch, but if you see a hummingbird, they're going
to be moving. If you notice, you never see a
hummingbird just kind of strolling around in your on your
deck or something. Yeah, they kind of have legs similar
(12:57):
to David Cross's character in that Titanic sketch from Mr. Show.
Do you remember, So that's he's kind of Hummingberg like
in that respect. But yeah, if your legs are that
week and your wings are that strong, you're gonna spend
most of your time in mid air. And they basically do,
although they do you know, they nest on branches, they
(13:18):
sleep on branches, they do perch. They made on branches.
As we'll see on your finger. Apparently they palm in
your hand. Oh, it was palm in your hand. It
was the palm in my hand. Yeah, I gave it
plenty of space. Um. And then they also sometimes will
sleep upside down, just kind of dangling from a twig
(13:39):
or something with their spinley little legs like a bat. Yeah.
So the just some amazing stats about their their ability
to fly. Like we said, they're the only vertebrate they
can hover in place. They can also fly upside down backward. Um.
They really are big time show offs. They can get
(14:00):
up to speeds of more than forty five miles per hour.
God knows how many kilometers per hour that is. It's
a lot on some of their dives. But even like
an average speed for them of just flying around you
know where they're not just you know, going from flower
to flower, but they're like say, traveling from place to place,
is you know, thirty plus miles an hour. That's pretty impressive. No,
(14:23):
it's super impressive. And if you think, man, a, how
fast are those little wings going and be what is
their little cardiovascular system doing? It's it's doing exactly what
you think it is. They have their heart beats about
two times per minute when it's hanging out and doing nothing,
about times a minute when it's flying, and those wings
(14:44):
range from seventy up and down strokes per second or
I wonder if that's if that counts as one or two,
And I was wondering that myself, and I'm not sure
that that is answered. At the very least, we're not
going to answer it because we don't have that answer. Well,
how about it doesn't matter because either way it's a ton.
(15:05):
It's either it's seventy times per second when they're just
flying normally around to get some some good sweet stuff.
But that courtship dive, which we're gonna talk about a
little later that you mentioned about two hundred times per
second those wings are flapping, Yeah, and I actually know
that you say it. If they're kind of doubling up
what a flap is, then maybe hummingbirds aren't so impressive
(15:26):
after all. Lazies, so chuck. When you're flapping your wings
a hundred or two hundred times per second, depending on
whether you're counting the upbeats and the downbeats as a
single flap or not. Um you need like a lot
of energy to do that, and as a result, The
hummingbird typically eats about two to three times its own
(15:48):
weight and food every day. Yeah, like if that was
a human, you would, uh, let me see here, that's
the equivalent of about it. Two hundred and eighty five
pounds of hamburger? Is that? And three hundred and seventy
pounds of potatoes? No? I think each of these Okay,
(16:11):
so take your pick. If you want to eat just hamburger,
it would be two five pounds a day. That's a
whole cow. That's uh yeah, I think a little bit.
I think cows way more than that. But well, but
as far as usable beef, I don't know. There you go.
I'm sorry for any vegetarians out there by me saying
usable beef just made wretch in your mouth. Maybe it's
(16:35):
an album name now that I think about usable beef
by the band what Jungle X. Right. So, uh, yeah,
they eat a lot because they need to, and um,
it's like it's like fourth of July for them every day. Yeah,
pretty much three two to three times their own waiting food. Yeah,
(16:57):
and this is uh we're talking about just on normal days.
Can we talk a little bit about the migration and
what they need to beef up, then I think we should.
So they migrate like we like we talked about, they're
not exactly sure what triggers that they think. Maybe they
see the change in daylight like some other animals and
birds do, or maybe just the fact that flowers, you know,
(17:17):
what the flowers are doing. But I think that that's
the one, that's the big one, because they can't go
for more than a few hours without food, so they
need to go where the plants are flowering, it right,
They just kind of follow that, and I guess they're
always connected to that, those subtle changes in the flowering exactly.
So during this migration, their heart beats about in sixty
(17:39):
times a minute, and they have to gain because they're trekking.
I mean sometimes they're they're flying over the Gulf of
Mexico and one shot over the course of a few days.
So they need to bulk up big time. They gain
about their body weight before they start this migration. And
if we're going to do the human equivalent again for this,
(17:59):
if you were person that wagh a hundred and seventy pounds,
that means you'd have to gain up to about two
fifty five in a few weeks time, Like Christian bale Esque.
I know in just a few weeks, man, that's crazy.
So um. One of the things that's so impressive about
the hummingbird is just how far it can fly in
(18:19):
a day, especially for how small it is, you know. Um,
they they average something like twenty three miles a day
when they're migrating. But the ruby throated hummingbird the one
that it's the only one that you'll find east of
the Mississippi. So if you see a hummingbird in your
east of the Mississippi, you can be like a ornithologist
(18:40):
for once in your life and be like, that's a
ruby throat at hummingbird. Um. They they actually can travel
for extraordinarily long stretches, and they do because their wintering
grounds are in the Yucatan, but they hang out in
Florida during the other part of the year, I guess
during the summer, and so they travel over the Gulf
(19:02):
of Mexico, they think, and when they do that, they
do it in like a straight five miles stretch within
eighteen to twenty two hours without stopping. That's that's incredibly impressive,
it really is. But then there was a study in
two thousand and sixteen that found they could go even further, right, Yeah,
they said, you know, physiologically, in theory they could fly
(19:24):
close to fourteen hundred miles without stopping if they needed to.
That's crazy. That's that'd be like flying from Atlanta to Albuquerque.
If you want a reference. That means nothing to nobody.
So if you're wondering when they rest, when they finally
get down to that sweet soil in Mexico, they can
enter torpor, which we've talked about before. It is sort
(19:45):
of hibernation light really deep sleep like state. Their metabolic
functions are really slowed. I think they can drop their
their body temperature by thirty to forty Greece fahrenheit. They
lower that heart rate from about twelve beats per minute
to as few as fifty And they do this after
they after they migrate, but they can do this anytime
(20:06):
they need to, and they do. Yeah, they do um
And also I think it depends on where they live
because hummingbirds, like I said, a lot of them live
in the andes, like high up on the mountain side,
and even in the summer, it can get kind of
cool there. So when the temperature cools enough that it
makes no sense for them to keep up their metabolic
(20:27):
rate to try to meet their hundred and five degree
hype body temperature, they'll enter torpor and that's just what
they do for sleep. Um and one of the other
things that I want to point out about them living
in the Andes, Chuck, This is all really just a
segue for this amazing fact they live in the Andes,
despite the fact and there are some species that are
(20:49):
native to the Andies, not just like migrating to that's
where they live as the Andies. Despite the fact that
they have these high metabolic rates and they need more oxygen. Well,
there's just inherently less oxygen in the air are up
in the mountains, and it's harder to hover because the
air is thinner. And yet they are so successful there
in the Andies that up above a certain line, there's
(21:10):
no insects, and so it's up to the hummingbirds exclusively
to pollinate all the flowering plants up there. Yeah, I mean,
I think that's that's probably why, like they have the
market cornered up there. They're like, all right, well, let's
adapt so we can kind of own this area. And
not only that, I don't think we mentioned that sometimes
if you're a small enough hummingbird and there's a big
enough insect, the insect is can can win that battle.
(21:35):
In hummingbird world, the insect eat you. Alright, Branson, misery,
Let's take a break. I figured that was going to
trigger a breage. All right, Well we'll come back right
now to talk more about hummingbirds. Okay, Chuck, So we're
(22:20):
talking more about hummingbirds. Um. One of the things that
I really feel like we just need to underscore here
is that they are metabolic wonders. They live on this
edge of survival where they will die if they go
a few hours without food. Like, do you know how
many days you a human being can go without food
before you die, as long as you have water and
(22:41):
maybe access to a couple of vitamins or whatever. We
did a podcast on that at some point, I'm pretty
sure we did. Yeah, Angus Barber or Barbie, I can't remember. Um,
they die within hours, so they constantly have to search
for food sources. Yeah, that's why you see them flitting
about constantly there, always looking for food. M But it's
(23:02):
also one of the reasons why they're known as potentially
the most unsociable and most territorial bird in existence. Yeah,
they don't like hanging out with each other. Um. There
are some exceptions that we're going to talk about, but
they generally don't don't like hang out together. They don't
like hanging out with other birds. At the end of
(23:22):
the day, when everyone's just sing songing by the shoreline,
hummingbirds are like, no, screw you, guys, I gotta eat.
And not only do I have to eat, I gotta
make a little hummingbird p eggs. And we talked about
this courtship dive. We kind of teased it out. This
is pretty incredible. Uh, and this is you know, one
of a lot of times in mating rituals you'll see
(23:45):
the males doing these kind of big fancy shows, Yeah,
trying and dogs playing poker. That was that was all about.
The photographer was a female dog, and so you'll, I
guess it wasn't a photograph, was it. It It was probably painting.
I think about it and stuff. You should know, world,
It was a photograp but it was a tin type
(24:06):
so it was very old. It's so um, it was funny.
I was telling my daughter today about my bed. She
always loves hearing stories about me and my brother as
a kid. And I was telling her about my teenage
bedroom and I was like, i'll show you a picture
one day. I've got pictures. And she said, you had
a phone when you were little, and I was like, oh, boy,
that's what it's like these days. And I had to
(24:29):
explain that, you know, this phone, camera and a phone
is kind of a new thing, Like they used to
be two different pieces of equipment. Yes, they were two
very bulky different pieces of equipment. And a phone used
to be attached to your wall in your kitchen. Oh yeah,
that's true. But if you were, you know, super wealthy,
(24:49):
you have when it was really really long, because that's
exactly the deal. So, uh. The courtship dive is when
the mail was trying to attra act the female for
a little loving They will fly up in the air
really high, about fifty or sixty ft and then dive
bomb toward the female as fast as it can go,
(25:10):
and they're they are flying the whole way. They're not
just they don't tuck the wing back and the wings
back like you're parachuting or something like. They're flying as
fast as they can right at this lady's face and
within inches of her head going full tilt. They just
pull up real quick and they hit her in the
arm twice and say two for flinching. They put on
(25:33):
the brakes and she flies right by. But that's what
they do is crazy. They fly right at their face
and then stop. If the female gets a little turned on,
she might flit about in the air with them, and
then that's where people might think, oh, look at those
two hummingbirds are up in the air having sex. Not
true now, and maybe your mom would tell you that
you need to leave the room because hummingbirds are doing
(25:54):
it right there. But that's not what they're doing. They
actually they actually um copulate perched on a branch, um man.
The female lands on the branch. Sometimes, like you said,
she'll join them in the air. Other times she'll just
(26:15):
be like, come on down here, you you win, let's
go and um. The male mounts are from behind on
the branch, and just like with everything else, the hummingbirds
are super quick at sex too. Apparently it takes about
four seconds and then that's it, like wham bam, thank
you ma'am, yep, and the male flies away. He doesn't
(26:38):
hang around and see if it took he goes on
to have sex with another female, and uh, the lady
goes like, what is this a fern bar? Who are you?
Jack tripper? And so she goes off and builds a
nest and does all the parenting. Like I said, you know,
they don't mate for life. They don't even stick around
(26:58):
after they mate at all. It's just they're in, they're out,
they're gone. And I mean you might think, well, that's
that's a pretty big bummer, poor poor female. Poor yeah,
poor lady hummingbirds. That that's exactly how they want it. Because,
like we said, as as the species is known as
or all of the species, the hummingbird is known as
(27:19):
the most territorial bird. So it seems, at least as
far as natural selection is concerned, females prefer this arrangement
no pair and printing um or mating pair and printing
to where they just do all the work themselves, because
that means that they can also have their own access
to their food source, to where no matter what the
(27:41):
what the male hummingbird is going to bring the table
and say childbearing or whatever, it's not worth the food
that this female would have to share. And that's where
their territoriality comes from because remember, hummingbirds live on this
edge of survival where if they go for hours without food,
they will die. So they are really really protective of
(28:02):
their food source, to the point where a female hummingbird
would preferably raised young on her own then share her
food source with the male. Yeah, I mean it's kind
of cool. Actually, I get the picture that the female
hummingbird is like, I need you for one thing. It
takes four seconds, and believe me, if I could go
to a sperm bank, I would prefer that. Honestly, I thought,
(28:24):
you're gonna say, believe me, you're gonna have the time
of your life. But those four seconds will be a
wild ride, my friend. That's right. Come come meet me
on this branch over here, baby, and tho it's gonna
be a it's gonna be a stone gas Hey, baby,
come here. So those gorgets that we were talking about,
(28:45):
those really colorful, iridescent, sort of fluffy chest and neck
feathers of the male um Like with many animals, the
more brightly colored and showy that is, the more the
female might be attracted because that might indicate that male
bird's fitness because you know, you gotta takes a lot
of work to keep that that hairstyle up. So he
(29:07):
must be pretty pretty strong and have, you know, pretty
good at organizing his day to day uh list to
do effectively the exact same signals that Joe Dirt put
out with his hair. You know, he was obviously very
genetically fit and ready to get I never saw that,
(29:27):
you should. It's definitely it's got a lot of heart.
I think I say that every time you say you
never saw it, but it's worth checking out for sure.
I'm it's one of those ones. You know, some don't
age very well. I think it came poorly aged right
out of the right out of the production facility, but
that that's one of the great beauties of it. It's
definitely worth seeing. Well, speaking of uh aged right out
(29:51):
of the shoot. Um. That's kind of the deal with
hummingbird babies too. The mom doesn't there's not a lot
of teaching and like here, let me show you the robes.
It's kind of like, all right, this is the world
you've been hatched from your little piece eyed egg. Now
go out there and be a hummingbird learn learn it
all on your own, kiddo. But what's amazing though, is
that they do learn this on their own. They have
(30:13):
astounding memories, to the point where when they migrate people
who put out feeders, which will talk about in a
little bit UM for hummingbirds, note that the same ones
um or what they believe is the same one, comes
back year after year. And what's even more astounding, frequently
on the same day of the year, the same date,
(30:36):
the same humming bird will come back year after year
on this on his or her migration, right, And that
they just understand this, they knows. And part of it, yes,
is following flowers and the blooming patterns of flowers. But
they also think it they might have UM some sort
of magnetic compass built in that possibly part of their
pineal gland, which is light sensitive, is used. UM manages
(31:00):
to use the sun as a compass. UM And that
they have a sounding memories somehow, some way, because apparently
their brain is about the size of a grain of
rice in most cases. Yeah, And the other thing they'll
go too is if they have UM speaking of coming
back to the buffet, if they have a a patch
of flowers, let's say, on your property that they just love,
they'll be like, all right, this is this is mine.
(31:22):
I'm just gonna go ahead and claim this. I'm gonna
come back here because you've got all the good stuff.
My beak fits that flower just perfectly. And uh and
we'll talk here in a minute more about what they
eat and why. But they will, they will fiercely protect
that little patch of flowers that they love so much
and go back to it time and time again. Yes,
(31:42):
So that's where their territoriality comes from, is protecting food sources,
and not just food sources, Like I've been growing this
patch of flowers all summer. Stay away. They could stop
somewhere for a half of an hour and um or
colloquially half hour um, and we'll still protect like that
(32:03):
flower patch that they stopped by if somebody comes along
and tries to get it. And the whole reason that
they do this is because, like they eat nectar along
with some other stuff, and it takes a really long
time for a flower to produce nectar. So the hummingbird
would love to just have to go to the flower
once and get the full dose of nectar, but they
(32:23):
can't just wait around because other things will um come
and eat there the nectar they've been hanging out for
so they've developed this secondary behavior, which is territoriality, where
they'll chase off other hummingbirds. They'll chase off over the birds.
They've been known to chase off hawks even if the
hawk comes a little close for their comfort. Yeah, and
they'll you know, I think early on in the in
(32:43):
the Hummingbird uh Council of nineteen fift they said all
the socialist hummingbirds got together and said, hey, if we
all relax, just let that nectar build up, it'll be
a lot easier to eat. And all the other you know,
the little I'm not gonna I don't want to get
cool here. But there were some hummingbirds that were like, no,
(33:03):
ay man, I'm not playing ball. I'm gonna get in
there and get that nectar whenever I feel like it. Right,
So the you couldn't work it out, no, and the ones,
the other ones that wouldn't go along with it, fired
all the air traffic controlling hummingbirds. That's right, Yeah, I
think we should take a break. I think so let's
take a break and we'll finish up about what they
(33:25):
eat and all about those little feeders that you have
in your backyard. Right after this okay, chuck, so um.
(34:00):
Everybody knows that hummingbirds eat nectar, and that's definitely true,
and they're very well adapted to eat nectar. They have
this tube like tongue that apparently uses a wicking action
to soak up nectar from a flower on a plant,
and they do this. This tongue can actually carry a
load of nectar into their mouths like thirteen times a
(34:20):
second fast. Not that surprising that they're doing this super
fast too, but um, it's still pretty impressive. But it's
not just nectar. It's not the only thing that they eat.
And actually people found out the hard way that they
didn't just eat nectar because captured hummingbirds who were studied
in the in in captivity died pretty quickly when all
(34:42):
they were given was like a sugar water solution or
even a nectar solution. And so they came to realize
that they actually eat a lot of insects too, And
that's one of the great things about hummingbirds. In addition
to being pollinators, they're also really big at insect controls.
And one of the insects that they eat or blood
sucking mosquitoes, Yeah, mosquitoes, little spiders. Uh. And this is
(35:05):
in addition to I don't think we mentioned, uh, the
one thousand to two thousand flower blossoms that they will
go poke every single day. M hm. So that's why
I mean when we talk about these these hummingbirds are
are food scavengers. Up to two thousand flowers a day.
That's pretty intense, it really is. So that makes them
(35:25):
very very important pollinators. Like we said in the andies,
where you know you're above the insect line, it's just
up the hummingbirds to pollinate flowers. So when they're going
from flower to flower getting that nectar, if you pretend
that evolution is a living, breathing thing, evolution has created
this arrangement where the flower produces a nectar treat in
(35:47):
exchange or to attract the little hummingbird. And then when
the hummingbirds getting its little nectar treat, the flower just
kind of goes, here's a little pollen on your forehead.
Go find another flower that looks like me, and you'll
find another nectar treat and then transfer this pall in
while you do so, they pollinate a lot of um
important stuff. And uh, in addition to to eating lots
(36:08):
of bugs, so they're just all around great animals. Yeah,
and uh, they love that nectar. If you're thinking about
flowers in your own garden, if you want to attract
some hummingbirds, they want to sugar content of about. Um.
It can't be too It can't be like a Windy's
frosty because they're using that That tongue acts sort of
like a straw, So you've gotta get that spoon with
(36:30):
the frosty. You can't suck that thing up. If you try,
you're gonna pass out in your car while you're driving.
Always look crossing so that that sugar concentrated can't be
too too sticky um, because like I said, they're sucking
that thing up. Um. Oftentimes you'll see red or orange
petals or bracts. Um. They're often long and tubular because
(36:51):
that long tongue and beak can get in there when
others can't. So that kind of gives them the market
cornered on that particular flower. It keeps out posers, it does.
And this is the cool thing. Those flowers that you
see that sort of trumpet downward. You know, unless you
can hover, you're out of luck there. So they love
these things because they can hover yep um. So there's
(37:14):
a lot of actually, there's a lot of plants that
have flowers that kind of fit this bill, and most
hummingbirds aren't really fit the bill man. That was an
unintentional I guess the beach. Well, you know the ducks.
Bill and ducks are birds right right, um so, but
(37:35):
they're not super specialized. They'll eat just about anything that
they can get nectar out of. But there are definitely
kinds of flowers that are UM have kind of co
evolved with hummingbirds to kind of give them what they're
looking for more easily. But one of the problems with UM,
with human development, as with all things, is we kind
(37:56):
of have supplanted a lot of those kinds of flowers
good uses. If you have heard all this and you're like,
I wanna encourage hummingbirds to keep living, you can plant
these flowers pretty easy. Yeah. I sent this list to Emily.
Actually because we have our garden is very um. Our
garden is very much built for use UM for use
(38:18):
and Emily's budding interest in herbalism and use for the
insects that we know and the birds that we know
inhabit our area. So it's not just like, oh that's
pretty like we wanted to be a real thing that
works for our local environment. I can't remember who said it,
but there's a famous quote that nothing useless can ever
(38:38):
truly be beautiful, and I found that that is one
of the truest things ever said. Nothing useless, useless can
never truly be beautiful. I think that broke my brain.
What does that mean? It just means that use like usefulness,
like the the ability for something too to have a purpose,
(39:03):
is an important part of his existence. And so just
beauty alone doesn't justify the exast. That's what I thought
it was saying. But something felt like a double negative
in there. That kind of broke my brain a little bit,
you overthought, I so uh be bomb the the old
trumpet creeper um, which was Miles Davis's nickname for a
(39:26):
little while when he was drilling holes in bathroom wall.
The cardinal flower, the columbine, and the coral honeysuckle are
all very hummingbird friendly flowers and plants that you can
put in your yard. And I said that to Emily,
and I think we have a couple of these. We
used to have columbine and dump she's gonna bring that back,
and uh, we we're gonna see if we can get
(39:47):
some more hummingbird action in our in our backyard. That's awesome,
some hot, sticky hummingbird act. Four seconds of pleasure. So um,
you can also just go get yourself a hummingbird feeder. Um.
And a lot of people put red food die in there,
and that is actually a controversial move. There's some concern
among hummingbird enthusiasts UM that the die actually can be
(40:11):
harmful over long periods of time, maybe it can build up,
because again, hummingbirds have very tiny origins because they're a
very tiny bird, so introducing this artificial red dye might
not be the best idea. Other people say, that's totally unsubstantiated.
There's never been any proof that it actually harms hummingbirds.
And then the other people say, back, it's totally unnecessary.
(40:32):
The bird's gonna find the sugar water either way, So
why add the red dye just in case it is harmful?
If it's just unnecessary. So most most hummingbird enthusiasts say,
don't put red dye in your hummingbird sugar water. Yes,
and that UM solution mixture is important. You can't just
don't just dump a bunch of syrup and water together,
(40:54):
or a bunch of sugar cane or whatever. It is
four parts water to one part sugar, because they need,
you know, specific sugar content of about and that four
to one makes about if my math is correct, it does.
It's is close enclose enough. So one of the other
ways you can help hummingbirds too is um in the
(41:14):
most delicious way by choosing coffee that has grown in
a situation that allows hummingbirds to thrive. Yeah, this is
I didn't know about this. This is really cool. There
there is certified bird friendly coffee because we were talking
about the andies and the fact that the birds travel
great distances and elevations up and down these mountains, and
(41:36):
coffee is grown about halfway up these tropical mountains and
they have a lot of great you know flowers under
the shady canopy there, and it's a really nice home
for hummingbirds there. And if you drink bird friendly coffee,
that means that there they have these flowers and they're
making sure they take care of these flowers, right, And yeah,
(41:56):
it's it's um grown in a kind of like a
simulated forest is closely simulated as possible. So you want
to look for something that says it's bird friendly, rainforest
alliance and or shade grown, and that probably means that
hummingbirds are thriving on those coffee plantations. And I went
and looked in my beloved bat Door from Bronson. Coffees
(42:18):
are all bird friendly of course and shade grown. Um
oh yeah, same here. I'm crazy for that. So I've
got a great, great blend for you, Um Trader Joe's
Decalfe Beans half and the other half um bat Door
from Bronson Whirling Dervish. It's it's the most amazing combination ever.
(42:43):
Want to get that a shot. I don't you know,
I'm not drinking coffee now because of it's not winter,
but Emily still has her latte every morning and she
she just has their you know, their espresso beans coffee
is a three hundred and sixty five day a year activity.
I know, not for me, but I get it. That's okay.
I'm not going to yum your yuck. Very well done.
(43:08):
So that's it for hummingbirds, right, that's it. Well, if
you want to know more about hummingbirds, get one to
land in your hand and study it up close and personal,
but don't mess with it because it's protected under the
Migratory Bird Treaty Act of the United States, and you
could land in jail and pay up to a two
thousand dollar fine for harm and good. Uh And since
(43:29):
I said two thousand dollar fine everybody, that means, of course,
it's time for listener mayl I'm gonna talk about the
exploding birthmark. Hey, guys, A big fan of the show,
which I listened to while I'm cooking breakfast, doing laundry
and staring oh boy, get this and staring at one
hundred thousand row Excel spreadsheets for work man, My soul
(43:55):
just shuddered. I know. I recently listened to the episode
on birth marks and thought even like to the story
of my birthmark that exploded. I was born with two birthmarks,
both of which have since been removed. One of those
birth marks was dark brownish red and a circle on
the inside of my right thigh. I didn't think much
of it because it wasn't very visible, and like you
said on the show, lots of people have birth marks. However,
(44:16):
when I was in the third grade, my family and
I were about to leave for my aunt's house to
celebrate Thanksgiving. When I realized my pants kept sticking to
my legs, I went to the bathroom and removed my pants,
and I saw blood running down my leg. As a
third grader who had not yet even learned about menstruation,
I assumed I was dying, so I freaked out. It
turns out my birth mark was the result of a
(44:38):
vascular malformation the size of a small bouncy ball in
my inner thigh. The tangled up ball of veins had
ruptured that Thanksgiving morning, and I had to go to
the e er where they stuck a tiny piece of
foam on my leg and probably charges about two thousand
dollars because hospitals. A few months later, I had it
surgically removed, and now I have a three inch long
scar instead of a birthmark. But because of my surgery,
(45:02):
I wasn't allowed to run for a few weeks and
I got out of running the mile. So who's the
winner now, Lucky, thanks for helping me seem really knowledgeable
on very specific topics, and that it's from Bailey. Nice Bailey.
That was a great story. Pretty good. Bailey left out
that ironically, both the birthmark and the scar were in
(45:22):
the shape of Satan. And by the way, Bailey says
in the PS that the other birthmark was hemangioma on
the bottom lip that was removed. So man, that's interesting stuff,
very interesting. And what was the fact that I kept
saying over and over again about haman Gioma's that they're
(45:44):
tangled cluster of blood vessels. I don't think so, okay,
So maybe there were two the same kind of birthmark.
Maybe so well, Thanks a lot, Bailey, And if you
want to get in touch with us, like Bailey didn't
share an amazing story, we're always up for those. You
can get in touch with us via email these days
at Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff You
(46:07):
Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works.
For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows. H
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of My
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and
Jerry's flitting around here. Here they're darting to and fro
like a little ruby throated hunter and Emerald and this
(00:25):
is stuff you should know. I saw Jerry. I know,
I heard Jerry, that's all with my own two eyes.
How she doing? Is her hair just completely white? Now? Well,
I mean we were fifteen ft away from each other,
so I couldn't tell. What did you try squinting? I did? Uh?
And I shaved so she didn't even recognize me. I know,
(00:46):
I saw that picture. Man, you look great. Yeah, thanks
so nice. It's just luxurious. Well, the beards coming back already,
huh from the second I shaved it, technically it started
coming back. That is true. Are you one of those
people who say, like, yeah, from the moment we're born,
we start dying. God, you know they're the pits. No,
(01:11):
hungrowing it back at It was just a little, uh,
just a little change of pace. You know. That's good.
Must have felt really weird. Uh, it does still feel
pretty weird at times. Well that's good. Well four days later, yeah, So, Chuck,
I want to talk about something else that's weird besides
the feeling of having just shaved off a beard after
(01:33):
fifteen million years, which, by the way, if you want
to see that picture, you can go to the movie
Crush page on Facebook and see that absolutely. And now
continue the weird thing I want to talk about today, Chuck.
Are hummingbirds. Hummingbirds, Yes, so they are weird, but they're
weird in all of like the most delightful ways. I
(01:55):
love hummingbirds, love them, and I love them even more
now that I know more about him. You just, Grandma,
the air snapped the wings off and popped like you
think a quail doesn't produce much meat hummingbird. I have
like forty of those for dinner at least that might
(02:17):
just be an appetizer. And good luck catching him though,
right they are hard to catch. But I have a story. Um,
there was a hummingbird once that got into my house
and it was for freaking out. It was basically just
smacking its head against the ceiling. I know. It was
very sad. So I got a chair and I just
held my hand up just right by it, and it
(02:39):
stopped freaking out and perched on my hand. I had
a hummingbird perched motionlessly on my hand, and it stayed
there long enough for me to stick my hand out
the window and it flew off. How many how many
years ago? Was this? That was a while back? I mean,
were you a child? No, No, I was I was
(03:00):
a man. I must have smelled great too, because the
hummingbird chose to trust me. But I thought that was
just one of the coolest things ever. That's pretty amazing. Um,
a guy in our neighborhood yesterday got attacked by an owl.
So that's on the other end of the bird human
interaction spectrum. Yeah, an owl or the Jersey devil. It
really apparently it's not uncommon to get attacked by an owl. Yeah.
(03:25):
I mean, we've got a big one that um makes
an almost every evening fly over our backyard to the
big forest behind our yard from across the street, and
we love this thing. But I didn't know that. I
didn't know that they attacked people like this. But it
happens your your neighbor, talking rabbit. I don't have a
neighbor to where it goes. It's an empty house, so
(03:46):
maybe that's why they like it. So No, who was
attacked though your neighborhood. Not a neighbor, but just I
saw it on the neighborhood facebook page. Some guy was attacked.
Like the owl came down and talent his head. It's crazy.
Imagine that that killed. I wonder if the guy was like, oh, look,
because as are huge. I wonder if he's like, man,
I look at that thing. Hey, he's coming at me.
(04:07):
And then all of a sudden, you've got talents in
your skull. Oh my god. All right, stop diverting attention
from hummingbirds. Yeah. So hummingbirds. Uh, they are with the family. Uh.
I had it. I had it earlier and it's really
not hard. Uh truck ala day, truck a delay, roca
(04:31):
lead and they are related to the swift's uh. And
you know hummingbirds, he said, the little bitty fellas. They
weigh between two and twenty grahams. They have those long
pointy noses that they love to stick in flowers. And
they have these wings that and boy, when we get
into the fascinating facts about the hummingbird and is those
(04:54):
little wings, it gets pretty amazing. But one of the
things I'm gonna go ahead and spoil from later and
this this stuff you put together was that what's so
remarkable about about hummingbirds and how they fly is that
they you know, usually when you see a bird fly,
they flap down and that provides their lift. Hummingbirds like,
no way, buddy, you gotta you gotta get that thing
(05:15):
working in both directions, double your pleasure up and down.
That is how a hummingbird is able to hover and
go in reverse and do all those crazy things is
because it's not just flapping, it's flipping and flapping. Yeah,
they're the only vertebrate animal that can hover like a helicopter.
It's like the Blue Thunder of birds. Whenn't that Roy
(05:39):
Scheider movie that was a good one. I think I
wasn't allowed to watch that because there's some sexy stuff
in there. There is the Yeah, the Blue Thunder peaks
in some windows, if you know what I mean. Yeah,
And it came out at a time when I would
watch movies with my mom and she was like, you
need to leave the room. Yeah. I don't think I
was allowed to watch it at first either, but I
(05:59):
think come out of snuck it. Oh, I see what
you mean so um. One of the things that that
makes hummingbirds so well known, aside from their incredible agility
and being the only vertebrate that can hover in midair,
is just the look of them. Because if you've ever
looked at a hummingbird from afar, you're like, oh, that
(06:20):
thing's okay. It's just a kind of a normal looking bird.
And then it just moves and catches the sun like
just right, and all of a sudden, this splash of
metallic jewel like color just crosses its throat and chest,
and you say, the hummingbird is truly great. Yeah, it's amazing.
It's sort of like the butterfly, uh wings and that
(06:43):
if you catch it at the right angle, you get
that that metallic sort of shiny color and it's and
it's sort of for the same reason those gorgets, which
is that uh, that reflective stuff on the upper chest
of the hummingbird, and like the throat area, it's not
actual pigment, it is the structure of the physical structure
of those feathers is little air bubbles inside there that
(07:07):
reflect that light. Right, Yeah, and I'm pretty sure we
I mean, we did an episode on um butterfly wings iridescence. Yeah,
and I'm pretty sure it is the exact same thing
in butterfly wings is in that gorge at that clutch
of feathers in the hummingbird. Yeah, so it not only
reflects it, but also like bulks it up to pretty
(07:27):
neat stuff. So, man, sorry, I guess I'm kind of
flemy today. I don't know why, but um my, apologies
for being flemy. So um. One thing I didn't realize
about hummingbirds is there's three and thirty eight species that
we know of, and all of them are found in
(07:48):
the America's Did you know that. I don't think I did,
But they are found like all throughout the Americas, from
Chile all the way up to a southern Alaska and Canada.
They've got a pretty wide range. But the thing is
that things are so small, so tiny and so um
(08:09):
unable to maintain a decent body temperature that they basically
follow the summer. Yeah, and they all diverged from a
single common ancestor about twenty two million years ago. And
the kind of the cool thing is that they keep
changing and their rate of speciation is really pretty incredible.
(08:30):
It's it's supposedly going to outpace their rate of extinction,
and we're going to see well we won't see it
because we'll be dead in the next forty years. But
but human beings, if we're still around that is, are
gonna see the number of species of hummingbird double to
what we have today. But it's going to be a
(08:51):
few million years, so don't expect that anytime soon. Yeah,
but it is pretty cool just to think that, you know,
they're still in the midst of their evolutionary history and
like right the middle of it. You know, I like
that about them. So UM, you know, being that that
multi varied species all the way from Patagonia up to Alaska. UM,
(09:14):
they have learned to adapt to a bunch of different
niches and habitats, right. So you can find UM hummingbird
species in like sub sea level deserts. You can find
them up in the Andes. There's actually a lot of
different species that live in the Andes Mountains. UM. You
can find the bulk of them in tropical forests, UM.
(09:37):
Around the tropics of the New World. UM. And they've
adapted like really well to their different environments. Some migrate,
some don't, UM, but all of them are very tiny. Yeah,
they're cute little little things. As if you look up
a picture of the bee hummingbird just prepared for one
(09:59):
of the kut this little I mean, it looks like
it looks fake. Yeah, do you know it doesn't look
like a bird could actually be that small without becoming
an insect. It's gonna just collapse into insect form at anymore.
But look it up online. The little b hummingbird from
Cuba ways about one point nine five grams. We don't
(10:20):
get those here in Georgia, the only kind. And I
think how many species are there in the United States,
About seventeen or eighteen that's what I saw, But only
that ruby throated is the one that we're going to
get here on the East coast. Yeah, and and just
to go, like to double that up, man, one point
nine five grams. Somebody did the math, and you could
(10:42):
mail fourteen of those things with one supposed to stamp
in the United States. Just smash them down flat. There's
not right. There's not a single species of hummingbird that
breaks an ounce and wait um, which is to say
that the largest hummingbird species there is the giant hummingbird,
which is kind of a contradiction in terms, it's still
(11:05):
smaller than an Atlantic canary. Wow, the giant hummingbird is
still canary size. So this is a very tiny group
of birds. Well, and this is the stat that gets me,
And this is the one I texted Emily because we
love our hummingbirds like all normal humans. Um, the eggs
of the ruby throated hummingbird that we have here in
(11:27):
Georgia are the size of a p Can you believe that?
Did you look up their um their nests pictures of
their nests. They're gorgeous. It looks like something you'd buy
on Etsy. They look kind of like made of felt.
Because hummingbirds use spider silk. They take old spider webs
and use them as thread to weave like um their nests,
(11:51):
along with plant fibers and leaves and twigs to give
it kind of the spongy, velvety, super cush feel for
their little bit babies velvety mouth feel exactly. So we're
gonna talk a lot about the hummingbird flying and because
it's pretty remarkable. It's one of the most remarkable things
(12:11):
in nature. Like I think it's right up there with
like the chromatophors of the octopus and uh, I was
about to spoil our live show, but maybe I should.
Are we ever gonna be on stage again? I don't know,
but let's just hold onto it just in case. All right,
we're gonna keep that in our back pocket. But the wings,
the wing muscles of hummingbird account to about of its
(12:35):
total body weight. So this thing is all like it
it It never has legs. Day at the gym, it's
always do an upper body and the legs are tiny
and weak, and they really don't walk. I mean, they
can perch, but if you see a hummingbird, they're going
to be moving. If you notice, you never see a
hummingbird just kind of strolling around in your on your
deck or something. Yeah, they kind of have legs similar
(12:57):
to David Cross's character in that Titanic sketch from Mr. Show.
Do you remember, So that's he's kind of Hummingberg like
in that respect. But yeah, if your legs are that
week and your wings are that strong, you're gonna spend
most of your time in mid air. And they basically do,
although they do you know, they nest on branches, they
(13:18):
sleep on branches, they do perch. They made on branches.
As we'll see on your finger. Apparently they palm in
your hand. Oh, it was palm in your hand. It
was the palm in my hand. Yeah, I gave it
plenty of space. Um. And then they also sometimes will
sleep upside down, just kind of dangling from a twig
(13:39):
or something with their spinley little legs like a bat. Yeah.
So the just some amazing stats about their their ability
to fly. Like we said, they're the only vertebrate they
can hover in place. They can also fly upside down backward. Um.
They really are big time show offs. They can get
(14:00):
up to speeds of more than forty five miles per hour.
God knows how many kilometers per hour that is. It's
a lot on some of their dives. But even like
an average speed for them of just flying around you
know where they're not just you know, going from flower
to flower, but they're like say, traveling from place to place,
is you know, thirty plus miles an hour. That's pretty impressive. No,
(14:23):
it's super impressive. And if you think, man, a, how
fast are those little wings going and be what is
their little cardiovascular system doing? It's it's doing exactly what
you think it is. They have their heart beats about
two times per minute when it's hanging out and doing nothing,
about times a minute when it's flying, and those wings
(14:44):
range from seventy up and down strokes per second or
I wonder if that's if that counts as one or two,
And I was wondering that myself, and I'm not sure
that that is answered. At the very least, we're not
going to answer it because we don't have that answer. Well,
how about it doesn't matter because either way it's a ton.
(15:05):
It's either it's seventy times per second when they're just
flying normally around to get some some good sweet stuff.
But that courtship dive, which we're gonna talk about a
little later that you mentioned about two hundred times per
second those wings are flapping, Yeah, and I actually know
that you say it. If they're kind of doubling up
what a flap is, then maybe hummingbirds aren't so impressive
(15:26):
after all. Lazies, so chuck. When you're flapping your wings
a hundred or two hundred times per second, depending on
whether you're counting the upbeats and the downbeats as a
single flap or not. Um you need like a lot
of energy to do that, and as a result, The
hummingbird typically eats about two to three times its own
(15:48):
weight and food every day. Yeah, like if that was
a human, you would, uh, let me see here, that's
the equivalent of about it. Two hundred and eighty five
pounds of hamburger? Is that? And three hundred and seventy
pounds of potatoes? No? I think each of these Okay,
(16:11):
so take your pick. If you want to eat just hamburger,
it would be two five pounds a day. That's a
whole cow. That's uh yeah, I think a little bit.
I think cows way more than that. But well, but
as far as usable beef, I don't know. There you go.
I'm sorry for any vegetarians out there by me saying
usable beef just made wretch in your mouth. Maybe it's
(16:35):
an album name now that I think about usable beef
by the band what Jungle X. Right. So, uh, yeah,
they eat a lot because they need to, and um,
it's like it's like fourth of July for them every day. Yeah,
pretty much three two to three times their own waiting food. Yeah,
(16:57):
and this is uh we're talking about just on normal days.
Can we talk a little bit about the migration and
what they need to beef up, then I think we should.
So they migrate like we like we talked about, they're
not exactly sure what triggers that they think. Maybe they
see the change in daylight like some other animals and
birds do, or maybe just the fact that flowers, you know,
(17:17):
what the flowers are doing. But I think that that's
the one, that's the big one, because they can't go
for more than a few hours without food, so they
need to go where the plants are flowering, it right,
They just kind of follow that, and I guess they're
always connected to that, those subtle changes in the flowering exactly.
So during this migration, their heart beats about in sixty
(17:39):
times a minute, and they have to gain because they're trekking.
I mean sometimes they're they're flying over the Gulf of
Mexico and one shot over the course of a few days.
So they need to bulk up big time. They gain
about their body weight before they start this migration. And
if we're going to do the human equivalent again for this,
(17:59):
if you were person that wagh a hundred and seventy pounds,
that means you'd have to gain up to about two
fifty five in a few weeks time, Like Christian bale Esque.
I know in just a few weeks, man, that's crazy.
So um. One of the things that's so impressive about
the hummingbird is just how far it can fly in
(18:19):
a day, especially for how small it is, you know. Um,
they they average something like twenty three miles a day
when they're migrating. But the ruby throated hummingbird the one
that it's the only one that you'll find east of
the Mississippi. So if you see a hummingbird in your
east of the Mississippi, you can be like a ornithologist
(18:40):
for once in your life and be like, that's a
ruby throat at hummingbird. Um. They they actually can travel
for extraordinarily long stretches, and they do because their wintering
grounds are in the Yucatan, but they hang out in
Florida during the other part of the year, I guess
during the summer, and so they travel over the Gulf
(19:02):
of Mexico, they think, and when they do that, they
do it in like a straight five miles stretch within
eighteen to twenty two hours without stopping. That's that's incredibly impressive,
it really is. But then there was a study in
two thousand and sixteen that found they could go even further, right, Yeah,
they said, you know, physiologically, in theory they could fly
(19:24):
close to fourteen hundred miles without stopping if they needed to.
That's crazy. That's that'd be like flying from Atlanta to Albuquerque.
If you want a reference. That means nothing to nobody.
So if you're wondering when they rest, when they finally
get down to that sweet soil in Mexico, they can
enter torpor, which we've talked about before. It is sort
(19:45):
of hibernation light really deep sleep like state. Their metabolic
functions are really slowed. I think they can drop their
their body temperature by thirty to forty Greece fahrenheit. They
lower that heart rate from about twelve beats per minute
to as few as fifty And they do this after
they after they migrate, but they can do this anytime
(20:06):
they need to, and they do. Yeah, they do um
And also I think it depends on where they live
because hummingbirds, like I said, a lot of them live
in the andes, like high up on the mountain side,
and even in the summer, it can get kind of
cool there. So when the temperature cools enough that it
makes no sense for them to keep up their metabolic
(20:27):
rate to try to meet their hundred and five degree
hype body temperature, they'll enter torpor and that's just what
they do for sleep. Um and one of the other
things that I want to point out about them living
in the Andes, Chuck, This is all really just a
segue for this amazing fact they live in the Andes,
despite the fact and there are some species that are
(20:49):
native to the Andies, not just like migrating to that's
where they live as the Andies. Despite the fact that
they have these high metabolic rates and they need more oxygen. Well,
there's just inherently less oxygen in the air are up
in the mountains, and it's harder to hover because the
air is thinner. And yet they are so successful there
in the Andies that up above a certain line, there's
(21:10):
no insects, and so it's up to the hummingbirds exclusively
to pollinate all the flowering plants up there. Yeah, I mean,
I think that's that's probably why, like they have the
market cornered up there. They're like, all right, well, let's
adapt so we can kind of own this area. And
not only that, I don't think we mentioned that sometimes
if you're a small enough hummingbird and there's a big
enough insect, the insect is can can win that battle.
(21:35):
In hummingbird world, the insect eat you. Alright, Branson, misery,
Let's take a break. I figured that was going to
trigger a breage. All right, Well we'll come back right
now to talk more about hummingbirds. Okay, Chuck, So we're
(22:20):
talking more about hummingbirds. Um. One of the things that
I really feel like we just need to underscore here
is that they are metabolic wonders. They live on this
edge of survival where they will die if they go
a few hours without food. Like, do you know how
many days you a human being can go without food
before you die, as long as you have water and
(22:41):
maybe access to a couple of vitamins or whatever. We
did a podcast on that at some point, I'm pretty
sure we did. Yeah, Angus Barber or Barbie, I can't remember. Um,
they die within hours, so they constantly have to search
for food sources. Yeah, that's why you see them flitting
about constantly there, always looking for food. M But it's
(23:02):
also one of the reasons why they're known as potentially
the most unsociable and most territorial bird in existence. Yeah,
they don't like hanging out with each other. Um. There
are some exceptions that we're going to talk about, but
they generally don't don't like hang out together. They don't
like hanging out with other birds. At the end of
(23:22):
the day, when everyone's just sing songing by the shoreline,
hummingbirds are like, no, screw you, guys, I gotta eat.
And not only do I have to eat, I gotta
make a little hummingbird p eggs. And we talked about
this courtship dive. We kind of teased it out. This
is pretty incredible. Uh, and this is you know, one
of a lot of times in mating rituals you'll see
(23:45):
the males doing these kind of big fancy shows, Yeah,
trying and dogs playing poker. That was that was all about.
The photographer was a female dog, and so you'll, I
guess it wasn't a photograph, was it. It It was probably painting.
I think about it and stuff. You should know, world,
It was a photograp but it was a tin type
(24:06):
so it was very old. It's so um, it was funny.
I was telling my daughter today about my bed. She
always loves hearing stories about me and my brother as
a kid. And I was telling her about my teenage
bedroom and I was like, i'll show you a picture
one day. I've got pictures. And she said, you had
a phone when you were little, and I was like, oh, boy,
that's what it's like these days. And I had to
(24:29):
explain that, you know, this phone, camera and a phone
is kind of a new thing, Like they used to
be two different pieces of equipment. Yes, they were two
very bulky different pieces of equipment. And a phone used
to be attached to your wall in your kitchen. Oh yeah,
that's true. But if you were, you know, super wealthy,
(24:49):
you have when it was really really long, because that's
exactly the deal. So, uh. The courtship dive is when
the mail was trying to attra act the female for
a little loving They will fly up in the air
really high, about fifty or sixty ft and then dive
bomb toward the female as fast as it can go,
(25:10):
and they're they are flying the whole way. They're not
just they don't tuck the wing back and the wings
back like you're parachuting or something like. They're flying as
fast as they can right at this lady's face and
within inches of her head going full tilt. They just
pull up real quick and they hit her in the
arm twice and say two for flinching. They put on
(25:33):
the brakes and she flies right by. But that's what
they do is crazy. They fly right at their face
and then stop. If the female gets a little turned on,
she might flit about in the air with them, and
then that's where people might think, oh, look at those
two hummingbirds are up in the air having sex. Not
true now, and maybe your mom would tell you that
you need to leave the room because hummingbirds are doing
(25:54):
it right there. But that's not what they're doing. They
actually they actually um copulate perched on a branch, um man.
The female lands on the branch. Sometimes, like you said,
she'll join them in the air. Other times she'll just
(26:15):
be like, come on down here, you you win, let's
go and um. The male mounts are from behind on
the branch, and just like with everything else, the hummingbirds
are super quick at sex too. Apparently it takes about
four seconds and then that's it, like wham bam, thank
you ma'am, yep, and the male flies away. He doesn't
(26:38):
hang around and see if it took he goes on
to have sex with another female, and uh, the lady
goes like, what is this a fern bar? Who are you?
Jack tripper? And so she goes off and builds a
nest and does all the parenting. Like I said, you know,
they don't mate for life. They don't even stick around
(26:58):
after they mate at all. It's just they're in, they're out,
they're gone. And I mean you might think, well, that's
that's a pretty big bummer, poor poor female. Poor yeah,
poor lady hummingbirds. That that's exactly how they want it. Because,
like we said, as as the species is known as
or all of the species, the hummingbird is known as
(27:19):
the most territorial bird. So it seems, at least as
far as natural selection is concerned, females prefer this arrangement
no pair and printing um or mating pair and printing
to where they just do all the work themselves, because
that means that they can also have their own access
to their food source, to where no matter what the
(27:41):
what the male hummingbird is going to bring the table
and say childbearing or whatever, it's not worth the food
that this female would have to share. And that's where
their territoriality comes from because remember, hummingbirds live on this
edge of survival where if they go for hours without food,
they will die. So they are really really protective of
(28:02):
their food source, to the point where a female hummingbird
would preferably raised young on her own then share her
food source with the male. Yeah, I mean it's kind
of cool. Actually, I get the picture that the female
hummingbird is like, I need you for one thing. It
takes four seconds, and believe me, if I could go
to a sperm bank, I would prefer that. Honestly, I thought,
(28:24):
you're gonna say, believe me, you're gonna have the time
of your life. But those four seconds will be a
wild ride, my friend. That's right. Come come meet me
on this branch over here, baby, and tho it's gonna
be a it's gonna be a stone gas Hey, baby,
come here. So those gorgets that we were talking about,
(28:45):
those really colorful, iridescent, sort of fluffy chest and neck
feathers of the male um Like with many animals, the
more brightly colored and showy that is, the more the
female might be attracted because that might indicate that male
bird's fitness because you know, you gotta takes a lot
of work to keep that that hairstyle up. So he
(29:07):
must be pretty pretty strong and have, you know, pretty
good at organizing his day to day uh list to
do effectively the exact same signals that Joe Dirt put
out with his hair. You know, he was obviously very
genetically fit and ready to get I never saw that,
(29:27):
you should. It's definitely it's got a lot of heart.
I think I say that every time you say you
never saw it, but it's worth checking out for sure.
I'm it's one of those ones. You know, some don't
age very well. I think it came poorly aged right
out of the right out of the production facility, but
that that's one of the great beauties of it. It's
definitely worth seeing. Well, speaking of uh aged right out
(29:51):
of the shoot. Um. That's kind of the deal with
hummingbird babies too. The mom doesn't there's not a lot
of teaching and like here, let me show you the robes.
It's kind of like, all right, this is the world
you've been hatched from your little piece eyed egg. Now
go out there and be a hummingbird learn learn it
all on your own, kiddo. But what's amazing though, is
that they do learn this on their own. They have
(30:13):
astounding memories, to the point where when they migrate people
who put out feeders, which will talk about in a
little bit UM for hummingbirds, note that the same ones
um or what they believe is the same one, comes
back year after year. And what's even more astounding, frequently
on the same day of the year, the same date,
(30:36):
the same humming bird will come back year after year
on this on his or her migration, right, And that
they just understand this, they knows. And part of it, yes,
is following flowers and the blooming patterns of flowers. But
they also think it they might have UM some sort
of magnetic compass built in that possibly part of their
pineal gland, which is light sensitive, is used. UM manages
(31:00):
to use the sun as a compass. UM And that
they have a sounding memories somehow, some way, because apparently
their brain is about the size of a grain of
rice in most cases. Yeah, And the other thing they'll
go too is if they have UM speaking of coming
back to the buffet, if they have a a patch
of flowers, let's say, on your property that they just love,
they'll be like, all right, this is this is mine.
(31:22):
I'm just gonna go ahead and claim this. I'm gonna
come back here because you've got all the good stuff.
My beak fits that flower just perfectly. And uh and
we'll talk here in a minute more about what they
eat and why. But they will, they will fiercely protect
that little patch of flowers that they love so much
and go back to it time and time again. Yes,
(31:42):
So that's where their territoriality comes from, is protecting food sources,
and not just food sources, Like I've been growing this
patch of flowers all summer. Stay away. They could stop
somewhere for a half of an hour and um or
colloquially half hour um, and we'll still protect like that
(32:03):
flower patch that they stopped by if somebody comes along
and tries to get it. And the whole reason that
they do this is because, like they eat nectar along
with some other stuff, and it takes a really long
time for a flower to produce nectar. So the hummingbird
would love to just have to go to the flower
once and get the full dose of nectar, but they
(32:23):
can't just wait around because other things will um come
and eat there the nectar they've been hanging out for
so they've developed this secondary behavior, which is territoriality, where
they'll chase off other hummingbirds. They'll chase off over the birds.
They've been known to chase off hawks even if the
hawk comes a little close for their comfort. Yeah, and
they'll you know, I think early on in the in
(32:43):
the Hummingbird uh Council of nineteen fift they said all
the socialist hummingbirds got together and said, hey, if we
all relax, just let that nectar build up, it'll be
a lot easier to eat. And all the other you know,
the little I'm not gonna I don't want to get
cool here. But there were some hummingbirds that were like, no,
(33:03):
ay man, I'm not playing ball. I'm gonna get in
there and get that nectar whenever I feel like it. Right,
So the you couldn't work it out, no, and the ones,
the other ones that wouldn't go along with it, fired
all the air traffic controlling hummingbirds. That's right, Yeah, I
think we should take a break. I think so let's
take a break and we'll finish up about what they
(33:25):
eat and all about those little feeders that you have
in your backyard. Right after this okay, chuck, so um.
(34:00):
Everybody knows that hummingbirds eat nectar, and that's definitely true,
and they're very well adapted to eat nectar. They have
this tube like tongue that apparently uses a wicking action
to soak up nectar from a flower on a plant,
and they do this. This tongue can actually carry a
load of nectar into their mouths like thirteen times a
(34:20):
second fast. Not that surprising that they're doing this super
fast too, but um, it's still pretty impressive. But it's
not just nectar. It's not the only thing that they eat.
And actually people found out the hard way that they
didn't just eat nectar because captured hummingbirds who were studied
in the in in captivity died pretty quickly when all
(34:42):
they were given was like a sugar water solution or
even a nectar solution. And so they came to realize
that they actually eat a lot of insects too, And
that's one of the great things about hummingbirds. In addition
to being pollinators, they're also really big at insect controls.
And one of the insects that they eat or blood
sucking mosquitoes, Yeah, mosquitoes, little spiders. Uh. And this is
(35:05):
in addition to I don't think we mentioned, uh, the
one thousand to two thousand flower blossoms that they will
go poke every single day. M hm. So that's why
I mean when we talk about these these hummingbirds are
are food scavengers. Up to two thousand flowers a day.
That's pretty intense, it really is. So that makes them
(35:25):
very very important pollinators. Like we said in the andies,
where you know you're above the insect line, it's just
up the hummingbirds to pollinate flowers. So when they're going
from flower to flower getting that nectar, if you pretend
that evolution is a living, breathing thing, evolution has created
this arrangement where the flower produces a nectar treat in
(35:47):
exchange or to attract the little hummingbird. And then when
the hummingbirds getting its little nectar treat, the flower just
kind of goes, here's a little pollen on your forehead.
Go find another flower that looks like me, and you'll
find another nectar treat and then transfer this pall in
while you do so, they pollinate a lot of um
important stuff. And uh, in addition to to eating lots
(36:08):
of bugs, so they're just all around great animals. Yeah,
and uh, they love that nectar. If you're thinking about
flowers in your own garden, if you want to attract
some hummingbirds, they want to sugar content of about. Um.
It can't be too It can't be like a Windy's
frosty because they're using that That tongue acts sort of
like a straw, So you've gotta get that spoon with
(36:30):
the frosty. You can't suck that thing up. If you try,
you're gonna pass out in your car while you're driving.
Always look crossing so that that sugar concentrated can't be
too too sticky um, because like I said, they're sucking
that thing up. Um. Oftentimes you'll see red or orange
petals or bracts. Um. They're often long and tubular because
(36:51):
that long tongue and beak can get in there when
others can't. So that kind of gives them the market
cornered on that particular flower. It keeps out posers, it does.
And this is the cool thing. Those flowers that you
see that sort of trumpet downward. You know, unless you
can hover, you're out of luck there. So they love
these things because they can hover yep um. So there's
(37:14):
a lot of actually, there's a lot of plants that
have flowers that kind of fit this bill, and most
hummingbirds aren't really fit the bill man. That was an
unintentional I guess the beach. Well, you know the ducks.
Bill and ducks are birds right right, um so, but
(37:35):
they're not super specialized. They'll eat just about anything that
they can get nectar out of. But there are definitely
kinds of flowers that are UM have kind of co
evolved with hummingbirds to kind of give them what they're
looking for more easily. But one of the problems with UM,
with human development, as with all things, is we kind
(37:56):
of have supplanted a lot of those kinds of flowers
good uses. If you have heard all this and you're like,
I wanna encourage hummingbirds to keep living, you can plant
these flowers pretty easy. Yeah. I sent this list to Emily.
Actually because we have our garden is very um. Our
garden is very much built for use UM for use
(38:18):
and Emily's budding interest in herbalism and use for the
insects that we know and the birds that we know
inhabit our area. So it's not just like, oh that's
pretty like we wanted to be a real thing that
works for our local environment. I can't remember who said it,
but there's a famous quote that nothing useless can ever
(38:38):
truly be beautiful, and I found that that is one
of the truest things ever said. Nothing useless, useless can
never truly be beautiful. I think that broke my brain.
What does that mean? It just means that use like usefulness,
like the the ability for something too to have a purpose,
(39:03):
is an important part of his existence. And so just
beauty alone doesn't justify the exast. That's what I thought
it was saying. But something felt like a double negative
in there. That kind of broke my brain a little bit,
you overthought, I so uh be bomb the the old
trumpet creeper um, which was Miles Davis's nickname for a
(39:26):
little while when he was drilling holes in bathroom wall.
The cardinal flower, the columbine, and the coral honeysuckle are
all very hummingbird friendly flowers and plants that you can
put in your yard. And I said that to Emily,
and I think we have a couple of these. We
used to have columbine and dump she's gonna bring that back,
and uh, we we're gonna see if we can get
(39:47):
some more hummingbird action in our in our backyard. That's awesome,
some hot, sticky hummingbird act. Four seconds of pleasure. So um,
you can also just go get yourself a hummingbird feeder. Um.
And a lot of people put red food die in there,
and that is actually a controversial move. There's some concern
among hummingbird enthusiasts UM that the die actually can be
(40:11):
harmful over long periods of time, maybe it can build up,
because again, hummingbirds have very tiny origins because they're a
very tiny bird, so introducing this artificial red dye might
not be the best idea. Other people say, that's totally unsubstantiated.
There's never been any proof that it actually harms hummingbirds.
And then the other people say, back, it's totally unnecessary.
(40:32):
The bird's gonna find the sugar water either way, So
why add the red dye just in case it is harmful?
If it's just unnecessary. So most most hummingbird enthusiasts say,
don't put red dye in your hummingbird sugar water. Yes,
and that UM solution mixture is important. You can't just
don't just dump a bunch of syrup and water together,
(40:54):
or a bunch of sugar cane or whatever. It is
four parts water to one part sugar, because they need,
you know, specific sugar content of about and that four
to one makes about if my math is correct, it does.
It's is close enclose enough. So one of the other
ways you can help hummingbirds too is um in the
(41:14):
most delicious way by choosing coffee that has grown in
a situation that allows hummingbirds to thrive. Yeah, this is
I didn't know about this. This is really cool. There
there is certified bird friendly coffee because we were talking
about the andies and the fact that the birds travel
great distances and elevations up and down these mountains, and
(41:36):
coffee is grown about halfway up these tropical mountains and
they have a lot of great you know flowers under
the shady canopy there, and it's a really nice home
for hummingbirds there. And if you drink bird friendly coffee,
that means that there they have these flowers and they're
making sure they take care of these flowers, right, And yeah,
(41:56):
it's it's um grown in a kind of like a
simulated forest is closely simulated as possible. So you want
to look for something that says it's bird friendly, rainforest
alliance and or shade grown, and that probably means that
hummingbirds are thriving on those coffee plantations. And I went
and looked in my beloved bat Door from Bronson. Coffees
(42:18):
are all bird friendly of course and shade grown. Um
oh yeah, same here. I'm crazy for that. So I've
got a great, great blend for you, Um Trader Joe's
Decalfe Beans half and the other half um bat Door
from Bronson Whirling Dervish. It's it's the most amazing combination ever.
(42:43):
Want to get that a shot. I don't you know,
I'm not drinking coffee now because of it's not winter,
but Emily still has her latte every morning and she
she just has their you know, their espresso beans coffee
is a three hundred and sixty five day a year activity.
I know, not for me, but I get it. That's okay.
I'm not going to yum your yuck. Very well done.
(43:08):
So that's it for hummingbirds, right, that's it. Well, if
you want to know more about hummingbirds, get one to
land in your hand and study it up close and personal,
but don't mess with it because it's protected under the
Migratory Bird Treaty Act of the United States, and you
could land in jail and pay up to a two
thousand dollar fine for harm and good. Uh And since
(43:29):
I said two thousand dollar fine everybody, that means, of course,
it's time for listener mayl I'm gonna talk about the
exploding birthmark. Hey, guys, A big fan of the show,
which I listened to while I'm cooking breakfast, doing laundry
and staring oh boy, get this and staring at one
hundred thousand row Excel spreadsheets for work man, My soul
(43:55):
just shuddered. I know. I recently listened to the episode
on birth marks and thought even like to the story
of my birthmark that exploded. I was born with two birthmarks,
both of which have since been removed. One of those
birth marks was dark brownish red and a circle on
the inside of my right thigh. I didn't think much
of it because it wasn't very visible, and like you
said on the show, lots of people have birth marks. However,
(44:16):
when I was in the third grade, my family and
I were about to leave for my aunt's house to
celebrate Thanksgiving. When I realized my pants kept sticking to
my legs, I went to the bathroom and removed my pants,
and I saw blood running down my leg. As a
third grader who had not yet even learned about menstruation,
I assumed I was dying, so I freaked out. It
turns out my birth mark was the result of a
(44:38):
vascular malformation the size of a small bouncy ball in
my inner thigh. The tangled up ball of veins had
ruptured that Thanksgiving morning, and I had to go to
the e er where they stuck a tiny piece of
foam on my leg and probably charges about two thousand
dollars because hospitals. A few months later, I had it
surgically removed, and now I have a three inch long
scar instead of a birthmark. But because of my surgery,
(45:02):
I wasn't allowed to run for a few weeks and
I got out of running the mile. So who's the
winner now, Lucky, thanks for helping me seem really knowledgeable
on very specific topics, and that it's from Bailey. Nice Bailey.
That was a great story. Pretty good. Bailey left out
that ironically, both the birthmark and the scar were in
(45:22):
the shape of Satan. And by the way, Bailey says
in the PS that the other birthmark was hemangioma on
the bottom lip that was removed. So man, that's interesting stuff,
very interesting. And what was the fact that I kept
saying over and over again about haman Gioma's that they're
(45:44):
tangled cluster of blood vessels. I don't think so, okay,
So maybe there were two the same kind of birthmark.
Maybe so well, Thanks a lot, Bailey, And if you
want to get in touch with us, like Bailey didn't
share an amazing story, we're always up for those. You
can get in touch with us via email these days
at Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff You
(46:07):
Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works.
For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows. H
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Chuck Bryant
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