Back in June I made the excellent decision to retire – good god I’m old – from the best job I’ve had in my entire 30+ year career. I have many things to say about not working in shitty jobs that undermine your self esteem and your self worth, but that’s for another time. When I retired, one of my favourite coworkers gave me this book, an incredibly thoughtful gift. It’s not a start-to-finish book for reading, but more of a carefully curated collection of interesting birds of North America, complied by David Sibley, one of the preeminent writers and illustrators in the field of ornithology. That said, the beginning of the book is a presented like story, collating bird facts such as how they fly, why they are colourful, how they reproduce, and what to do if a bird hits your window* or gets trapped in your house.
Here are some of the more interesting tidbits that I came across:
- The colour of birds can be produced either by pigments or because of the nanostructure of the surface of feathers. See point #2…
- There is no blue pigment in birds. I’ll say that again. None of the blue colours you see in any bird anywhere in the world is the result of pigment. Blue colour arises solely due to the microscopic structure of feathers. Simply put, feathers are structured such that blue light reflects off multiple surfaces in a way that causes the wavelengths to align in the same phase and add together, while all other colours reflect out of phase and cancel out. This is why you “see” blue even though there is no blue pigment. Crazy!
- The Blackpoll Warbler is the long-distance migration champion, travelling as far as 11,000 km (7,000 miles) between Alaska and central Brazil each spring and fall.
- Not all birds’ bills are rigid. The tip of a sandpiper’s bill can “flex” in order to grasp prey buried in sand or mud. Like lips. I find this extremely weird and kind of freaky.
- The Common Loon needs a large stretch of open water to fly, because it needs to take a long running start in order to take off in flight. They can actually become trapped if they land in a pond that is too small!
- Feathers can have growth bars similar to tree rings! The bars alternate between subtly lighter and darker lines, with each dark-light combination indicating a single 24-hour period of growth. Darker bands grow during the day, and lighter bands at night.
A whole bunch of things about birds are still a mystery!
- Why do some birds hops and some birds walk?!
- Murres commonly dive in the ocean to 600 feet or more to find fish. Nobody knows how they find fish at that depth, or even survive!
- Birds radiate heat through their bills so bird with bigger bills live in warmer climates. Except Puffins. How do Puffins survive in very cold water with such large bills? Unknown!
And finally, a fascinating tale about Chimney Swifts, a threatened species in Ontario:
The high, sharp twittering of Chimney Swifts is a common sound over eastern towns in the spring and summer, but you will never see one perched. These remarkable birds spend the entire day high in the air, and spend the night clinging to the walls inside a chimney. Before the advent of chimneys, they roosted and nested in large, hollow trees, or even on the bark of large trees protected by an overhanging limb. Exactly how they spend their winters is not known. Once they start migrating in September to the wintering grounds in South America, it’s possible that they stay in the air for the entire time, until they return to their nesting chimney the following April. Recent research has documented that some other species of swifts stay airborne, flying continuously, for up to ten months. How and when they sleep is still unknown, but a study of frigatebirds showed them flying continuously for weeks at a time, and that the time spend sleeping each day during continuous flight was only 6 percent of the daily sleep they get when they can perch. Like other birds, they can sleep one side of their brain while the other side is still alert, but flying frigatebirds actually spend about one-quarter of their sleep time with both sides of the brain asleep!
* You can choose to prevent birds from hitting your windows at all by purchasing and installing these feather-friendly collision prevention dots on the outside of your windows. These dots break up reflections that cause birds to strike windows in the first place. You can also hang strings, decorate your windows with soap, or apply your own decals but these options must be no more than 2 inches apart. I’m passionate about this, and I apologize in advance for how many times you are going to hear me talk about it.