There’s a pretty big variety in the bird world. From tiny wrens and goldfinches to flightless species like ostriches and powerful swimmers like gannets, the birds of planet Earth have a lot of niches covered. However, there is only one bird species that can truly fly backwards.
Hummingbirds are famous for being pretty; in fact, they are the most colorful of all known bird species. They also have a lot of other tricks packed into those teeny tiny bodies. They are capable of flapping their wings 20 to 80 times a second and can even reach speeds that rival fighter jets. However, these wings are not like other birds, instead, they are super stiff and stick almost straight out from the hummingbird’s body.
To allow them to pull off their fancy flight maneuvers, hummingbirds have unique joints that allow the birds to rotate their wings in a figure-eight pattern. This allows them to sustain their hectic flapping schedule and fly backwards for a sustained period. Some birds are capable of fluttering backwards for brief periods, but only hummingbirds are the true masters of this skill. Using their wrist joints, they can generate lift on the upstroke, a feat not possible in most other species.
“It has adopted an insect-like flight style with the evolutionary heritage of a vertebrate,” said Tyson Hedrick, a biologist at the University of North Carolina, and lead author of a 2011 study, told Nature. “It has got essentially the same arm bones that we have, but it’s doing this funny thing with its shoulder, flipping the wing back and forth like a fruit fly rather than a pigeon.”
To get through small openings, the birds pull their wings close to their bodies and shoot through the holes like a bullet. They may also turn sideways to navigate particular openings.
“One story that I tell myself,” biologist Marc Badger told Science News, “is that once they get a sense of what’s on the other side and a sense of their surroundings, then they switch over to this ballistic technique to avoid the consequences.”
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