Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Hummingbirds

Right now, I'm going to talk about hummingbirds. A cool thing about hummingbirds is that they use spider silk in their nests. The spider silk doesn't let the heat escape so it acts as a good incubator. When the nest is fully made it barely fits the female hummingbird. Hummingbirds lay no more than two eggs. How will this tiny little nest fit two hummingbirds? As the baby hummingbirds grow the spider silk expands. It's like going from a crib to a little boy bed to a big boy bed. Also if you leave your hummingbird feeder out a little bit later towards the winter, you might get some late migrators. If you do get late migrators they will most likely pig out. Down in Marshall Illinois a neighbor puts out four to five feeders and he gets over twenty hummingbirds at a time. The Ruby Throated Hummingbird travels about 600 miles across the Gulf of Mexico. Hummingbirds can flap their wings 60 to 200 times per seconed. They have very weak feat so they perfer to fly. They can barely walk on those weak feet. Also they do perch. Hummingbirds can fly up to 60 miles per hour and can live from 4 to 5 years in the wild. Hummingbirds eat 50% of their body weight every day! 30% of a Hummingbirds weight is flight muscles. There are 343 speicies of hummingbird.

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