• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

What’s The Fastest Bird In The World?

June 25, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

The peregrine falcon is no slouch. Capable of achieving speeds of over 320 kilometers per hour (200 miles per hour), this rapid raptor is not just the fastest bird in the sky, but the speediest animal on the planet.

Advertisement

However, the peregrine falcon is only able to reach these dizzying speeds when performing a kind of dive known as a hunting stoop. When it comes to level flight, there’s another bird that takes the gold.

Advertisement

Sticking with the overall champ for now, a hunting stoop is essentially a break-neck free-fall maneuver that the falcon uses to catch its prey. Soaring to a height far above its victim – which may well be another bird – the peregrine then tucks in its wings to ensure a more aerodynamic shape before plummeting beak-first, almost straight downwards.

A split-second before reaching its target – whether on the ground or in the air – the falcon spreads its wings in order to break its fall and change direction. The fastest speed ever clocked by a peregrine falcon in a hunting stoop is 389.46 kilometers per hour (242 miles per hour), which was achieved by a bird named Frightful from Washington State.

Recorded as part of a documentary for National Geographic, this meteoric descent began when the falcon was released from a plane at an altitude of 5,182 meters (17,000 feet), which is far higher than a bird of this sort would usually fly. The validity of this record has therefore been challenged by some ornithologists who question whether a peregrine falcon could reach such a high speed under normal conditions.

Despite their ridiculous vertical velocity, however, peregrine falcons are no match for the common swift when it comes to regular, wing-powered flight. During courtship displays – known as “screaming parties” – these small birds live up to their names by accelerating to their top speed, with the fastest ever recorded flight being 111.6 kilometers per hour (69.3 miles per hour).

Advertisement

While this is the highest speed to have been reliably measured in a bird in level flight, it’s widely thought that the white-throated needletail – a relative of the common swift – may be able to go much faster, with unconfirmed reports suggesting a top speed of 169 kilometers per hour (105 miles per hour). 

For the time-being, however, the title of fastest animal in level flight actually belongs to a mammal. Putting all avian contenders to shame, the Brazilian free-tailed bat has stolen the crown by traveling at a speed of 160 kilometers per hour (99.5 miles per hour) – much to the disappointment of all the swifties out there.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. U.S. banking lobby groups oppose proposed tax reporting law
  2. US stock futures lead Asia lower, dollar gains on yen
  3. Shark-Infested Lakes Exist And You Might Have Already Swum In One
  4. Over 6,000 Scans Reveal What ADHD Looks Like In The Brain

Source Link: What’s The Fastest Bird In The World?

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • What Alternatives Are There To The Big Bang Model?
  • Magnetic Flip Seen Around First Photographed Black Hole Pushes “Models To The Limit”
  • Something Out Of Nothing: New Approach Mimics Matter Creation Using Superfluid Helium
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version