Birds and Insects

The fastest flying bird is the peregrine falcon.  Peregrine falcons are known for their grace, beauty and speed.  They can fly at over 100 mph.  In a dive, they’re able to reach a speed of 200 mph.  Incredibly, the peregrine falcon is able to maneuver making turns and changing direction at such dizzyingly fast speeds.  They can be found on all continents but Antarctica, but are most often found along the coasts.

Albatrosses are large seabirds that have the largest wingspan of any living birds.  The wandering albatross has a wingspan of up to 11 to 12 feet.  They are able to smell food in the water from 12 miles away.  They can sleep while flying.  They can ride updraft ocean wave winds to gracefully glide and soar seemingly effortlessly for prolonged hours at a time.  Albatrosses are skilled at a form of energy-conserving flying called dynamic soaring which gives them the ability to soar for many days far up in the sky riding ocean winds.  They can travel up to 75,000 miles a year.

The ostrich is the biggest bird on earth.  It can grow up to an impressive 9 feet tall and weigh up to a whopping 287 pounds!

God planted certain information in birds’ brains that enable migrating skills and patterns.  The Manx shearwater birds in Wales migrate each year from South America.  They fly about 250 miles per day.  One Manx shearwater that was tracked was known to have flown over 5 million miles.  These birds are long-lived. One was recorded as being known to be at least 55 years old.

The Blue Morpho butterflies of Central and South America can be seen from a quarter mile away.  These special butterflies have what is called “structural color.”  They get their brilliant blue lustrous color from very complex light-scattering nanostructures in their wing scales.  The Blue Morpho’s bright, shiny-looking coloring can appear as though it is flashing.

Over 12,000 species of ants have been discovered.  Their combined weight is equal to the weight of all of the people on earth.

As the seasonal food resources change, about 50 billion birds undertake migration in pursuit of food and nesting locations, many traveling thousands of miles year after year.

Flocks of hundreds or thousands of certain small birds such as starlings, can move in stunning coordinated aerial displays, a phenomenon called murmuration.  The birds maneuver together in synchronized fashion, turning and twisting and changing direction and achieving perfect harmony in motion.  No one knows all that’s involved in this mysterious, mesmerizing acrobatic display that can look like a flying black cloud.  The number of starlings in the U.S. is thought to be around 200 million.

Agile hummingbirds can execute helicopter-style aerial feats.  They can hover, fly up, fly down, fly sideways and fly backwards, hang steady in the air and rise vertically.  They hold the distinction of being the only bird known to be able to fly backwards.  In addition, they are reportedly the fastest bird.  Their have strong muscles that allow their wings to beat fast, and their wings are shaped to beat faster.  They have flexible shoulder joints that allow them to bend into extreme positions not seen in other birds.  Their wings can beat remarkably fast when hovering – from 20 to 90 beats per second.  They also can fly fast at 20 to 30 mph.  They can have wing beats greater than 4,000 beats per minute.  When hovering over flowers to drink nector, the horned sungem hummingbird can beats its wings at a fast 90 beats per second, faster than most hummingbirds.  During courtship, the ruby-throated hummingbird may beat its wings as fast as 200 beats per second.  Every day the hummingbird receives nectar from 2,000 flowers.  The hummingbird’s powerful anatomical features, flexibility, and structure are unique.  So far, engineers have not been able to design a machine that can execute movements similar to the talented little hummingbird.  Hummingbirds move their wings in fast figure-8 configurations.  There are over 300 species of hummingbirds.  Besides their amazing flight acrobatics, they come in some beautiful jewel-like brilliant colors.  Their iridescent color comes from nanostructures that act like prisms reflecting and refrating light.

When woodpeckers beat their beaks in rhythmic fashion against a tree, other woodpeckers are able to recognize one another by the distinct speed and rhythm of the woodpecker’s drumming.

Depending upon the species, birds may have from over 900 to 25,000 feathers.  The whistling swan has more than 25,000 feathers.  While the ruby-throated hummingbird has but 940 feathers, that’s still more feathers for its small size than the whistling swan.  When we find a feather, we marvel at its ephemeral beauty and complexity.  Some birds even have ultraviolet feathers seen only by other birds.

Though figures vary widely, it is estimated there are over 50 billion varied birds (over 8,600 species), of which 3 billion are domestic chickens, living on our planet.  Some birds travel the world while others do not fly.  Birds are the only animals with feathers.

Penguins are categorized as flightless seabirds.  On the ice in Antarctica, when the adult emperor penguin returns with food for its young chick, it comes upon a colony having thousands of similar penguins.  The adult has to find its own mate and chick by the uniqueness of its call, so a call from among 300,000 other penguins must be recognized as familiar.  They would all sound similar to us, but the little penguin is equipped with super acute hearing and will recognize the cry of its own parent because it is able to distinguish minute differences in frequencies.

The spider’s silken web is an ingenious architectural wonder, a delicate net having great strength and elasticity.  Spider silk is one of the strongest known fibrous materials.  It is robust but also flexible.  The wondrous spider fabric is stronger, weight for weight, than the best steel wire made by human beings.  The spider manufactures silk protein in its silk gland.  It is still soluble at this stage.  But as it passes to the spinneret outlet in the spider’s body, it transforms into an insoluble material.  The formation of spider silk in order, structure and arrangement is an amazingly complex feat.  Molecular scientists have not yet been able to design polymers having molecules programmed with the same sophisticated sort of hierarchical structure used by spiders.  

Mechanics governing bird migration is still a mystery.  How they orient their way to travel so far and so long is still unknown.  It is not positively known if bird migration skills and habits are attributable to genes, innate knowledge, a magnetic sense, an acquired skill or geographic sense.

Murmuration is the word that describes the gorgeous synchrony of mystifying maneuvers seen when a large flock of flying birds seem to soar seamlessly as one unit moving together.  It is a mystery still how such a remarkable aerial display is accomplished by flocks of starlings and other small waders such as dunlins.  With astounding feats of coordination, starling flocks consisting of 1000’s of birds can easily twist, turn, and speedily change direction together seemingly effortlessly as though one massive unit.  This impressive skyward display is called murmuration.

Bears and hedgehogs aren’t the only creatures who hibernate when temperatures drop.  Some bird species are known to go into a similar semi-hibernation-like state called torpor.  Chickadees, hummingbirds, doves and several other bird species use torpor.  Both the Poorwill of western North America and Trilling Nighthawk can be found hibernating in winter months when their hearts will beat much more slowly and their body temperatures drop.  Before settling in for their deep, long winter sleep, the hibernating birds will eat extra amounts to build up a store of body fat to hold them through their hibernation, and their feathers will fluff out to prepare before sheltering in for the more difficult months when food is less available.  God provides for birds.

Honeybees are extremely important to us.  1 out of every 4 bites of food you eat is here because of bees’ pollination work.  Their pollination services are responsible for about 80% of all fruit and vegetable and seed crops in the USA.  On a sunny day, one worker honeybee can visit from 50 to 100 flowers per trip collecting nectar to process into honey.  She can make 12 to 15 or more such trips a day, visiting up to 1,500 flowers a day.  In its lifetime one bee will make just 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey.  Every bee colony smells different to a bee.  Bees have a very keen sense of smell, and as each colony has its own unique odor, bees are able to know where home is.  Guard bees identify and protect against intruders in their hive.

Bees are absolutely amazing!  There are around 20,000 species of bees around the world.  A bee’s wings beat at an astonishingly fast speed of 190 times (or more) a second or 11,400 times in 1 minute.  This accounts for that distinctive buzzzz!  Honey bees communicate with each other through dancing, a way they message one another about where the best flowers are.  Bees are very busy.  They work hard. The life of a worker honeybee is only about 51 days.  One bee colony is able to produce 60 to 100 pounds of honey a year.  Just to make 1 pound of honey:  1) A bee must visit and collect the nectar from approximately 2 million flowers.  2) The bees in 1 colony or hive must fly more than 55,000 miles to gather nectar to produce a  pound of honey.  This process makes for the lifetime work of approximately 768 bees.  Bees have 3 million hairs that help them trap and collect pollen.  When bees lick pollen from flowers, pollen sticks to their head, eyes and mouth.  Fortunately the bee has little brushes located on their front legs that are used like little windshield wipers for cleaning off this pollen. 

Honey is comprised of at least 180 known different compounds and is renowned for medicinal uses because of its healing and anti-inflammatory properties.

Some flowers hold secret attraction signals for bees.  Bees have the ability to see ultraviolet light, so they are able to see markings on flowers humans can’t see. Whereas we would see just a white flower (e.g. a wild cherry flower), a bee sees the flower as blue-green.  Bees are able to see special markings on flowers that we aren’t able to see.  Flower markings are like landing lights on a runway to bees.  They guide the bee down the right path it should go to collect and deliver pollen.  How special is that!

It’s not fully understood just how some insects are able to sense and interact with magnetic fields, but along those lines, here’s a very interesting phenomenon about bumblebees:  They are sensitive to electrical fields.  A bumblebee’s beating wings can produce an electrical field that changes the electrical field of the flowers the bee visits.  Incredibly, when subsequent foraging bumblebees visit that same flower they are able to read the signal of that flower’s altered electrical field and interpret that the nectar has already been taken from that flower.

Monarch butterfly migration is one of the more spectacularly beautiful phenomena in all Creation.  The marathon of monarch butterflies is an incredible feat and sight.  Millions of monarchs take flight in a group for hours at a time and fly exceptionally great distances.  Streams of millions of monarch butterflies make extraordinary migrations at a rate of 9 mph and 70 to 90 miles per day.  They will travel 2,000 miles from northern locations towards the mountains of central Mexico, and their trip will take a month.  They don’t fly at night.  Then in March, the monarch butterflies’ dramatic migration  heads for regions north.  3 generations of females will lay their eggs.  Only the 4th generation butterflies return, and it is a return to a place they’ve never been.  The famous mass migration of monarch butterflies is an intriguingly wondrous spectacle.

The peacock’s fancy, glimmering fanned out feathers are a stunning spectacle of outstanding beauty to behold! When its quills are fully fanned, a male peacock can display one of the most dazzling, rainbow-colored masterpiece shows on earth!  The typical male peacock has about 200 uniformly spaced tail feathers having around 170-200 gorgeous blue-green “eye” spots.   Here’s an interesting fact:  The peacock’s feathers aren’t colored this beautifully due to pigment.  Rather, it’s a figuration called “color structure.”  The gorgeous shiny colors are a result of a thin film optimum design phenomenon called thin film interference (TFI).  Nanostructures of keratin-like proteins interact with light.  The prism-like structures are not so unlike how roof tiles are configured.  The “tiles” act like little prisms to selectively reflect blue and green.  They refract light in such a way that it is luminous and brilliant.  This process required to produce the familiar “eye” pattern is extremely complex and precise.  Many aspects of the male peacock tail feathers’ “color” mechanism components (e.g. keratin thickness, intersection points) had to have been coordinated to a remarkably exacting “just right” degree for the beautiful colors to be seen in the peacock’s tail feather display.  The resulting feature is called iridescence, a splendid phenomenon also found in butterflies, ducks and hummingbirds.  Iridescent color changes with the angle of view.  Like other devices operating in Creation (e.g. bacteria flagellum and cilia) the mechanics of peacock tail aesthetics require many parts and aspects to be already present together (e.g. particular features involving keratin layers and barbule shape) for the structure to function.  Thin interference is another one of those elements where several characteristics must all be present simultaneously for the structure to work how it does.  It seems the only function of the glorious tail feather show seems to be that it provides a gratuitously beautiful display.  Selecting for a mate need not have required such show-stopping prancing fancy surplus beauty on display.  Engineers label this kind of great beauty “added beauty” because its sole purpose is to provide a beautiful display.  There is an extremely high level of optimum optical design to the peacock tail feathers.  There is embellishment purely for the sake of adding beauty.  Another unique characteristic is that the blue-green, turquoise jewel-colored array of peacock feather “eyes” are an arrangement of spirals inward to the peacock in Fibonacci pattern.  The peacock’s elaborate back-and-forth train-rattling display can have a vibration component also accompanied with a hum sound.  Researchers investigating the frequency range found it matches the frequency of the colorful plumage on the peacock’s head.  The train feathers are still long and heavy when folded up for flying.  The peacock is able to regularly fly short distances.

There are over 2,000 species of fireflies.  Fireflies (sometimes referred to as lightning bugs) can create fantastic light shows using special light-producing organs in their abdomen to make certain chemicals and gases which allow the fireflies to light up.  This kind of production is called bioluminescence.  However, not all fireflies have the ability to glow.  Fireflies can control how long and  how often they glow.  Some can flash in synchronicity as a group.  Each species flashes with a different light pattern.