Date: 09/23/2011

Number: 2

2 immature females. warm days still here, as are flowers and bugs. Read the following:
When male hummingbirds compete for mates, they climb high into the air on their tiny wings, only to nose-dive back down again at speeds up to 20 meters per second, belting out high-pitched squeaky calls along the way. But the hummers are not humming: research published in Science revealed that it’s the birds’ tail feathers that are actually making the sound.
Ornithologists at Yale University fist identified the fortissimo feathers when they plucked out the hummingbirds’ outermost tail plumes and found this silenced the courting birds. But it still wasn’t clear how the feathers were making the sounds. In the new study, tail feathers from 14 different hummingbird species were put into a wind tunnel that mimicked the birds’ normal dive-bombing velocities. Each groups’ feather made a different sound, and likewise, when the researchers tested the feathers from non-hummingbird genera, they also made individualized, species-specific sounds. Feathery communication could be quite common in the bird world, and may provide a more accurate proxy of a bird’s flight prowess than vocal signals, the researchers said in a press release.

CHARLESTOWN, RI

Latitude: 41.4 Longitude: -71.7

Observed by: VIRGINIA
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