Bird Facts

Bird Facts

Birds are warm-blooded creatures, like mammals, but they lay eggs, like most reptiles. All birds have feathers and wings, and most birds are able to fly. Birds are amazingly varied in their shapes, sizes, colors, and behavior patterns.

Bird Facts #1 What Makes a Bird a Bird ? Feathers !
Birds are the only creatures with feathers. ”Light as a feather” is no exaggeration. Feathers weigh very little, but birds could not live without them. Feathers allow flight, provide terrific insulation, and keep rain and snow away from the skin. They can be colorful as a rainbow or make a bird blend in perfectly with its surroundings.

Feather Types.
Birds have several different types of feathers, including contour feathers and down feathers. Soft and fluffy, down feathers grow under the body feathers and provide insulation. A contour feather may be a large, stiff feather on the wing or tail like this one, or a smaller body feather. Every feather on a birdas body is controlled by a set of tiny muscles, which allows the bird to raise or lower them -- fluffing its feathers on a cold day, for example.

You need a microscope to see that each barb in a feather’s vanes is covered with tiny hooks that grip each other like miniature zippers. You can pull the barbs apart, then stroke them back together again with your fingertips. A bird does this with its beak when it preens.

Out with the Old
Most birds replace their feathers every year, a few at a time, in a process called molting. A new feather grows out of the skin, inside a covering that looks like a straw; when it is fully grown, the cover peels away. Ducks and geese lose all their big wing feathers at once, so they are flightless for a few weeks in summer while the new ones grow in.

An Incredible Quantity of Feathers
All the feathers on a bird’s body are called its plumage. A tiny Ruby-throated Hummingbird has about 1,000 feathers; a White-throated Sparrow has about 2,000. A scientist once counted every feather on a Tundra Swan, from the largest wing quills to the tiniest fluff of down, and came up with 25,216.

According to Wikipedia, birds (class Aves) are winged, bipedal, warm-blooded, vertebrate animals that lay eggs. There are around 10,000 living species, making them the most numerous tetrapod vertebrates. They inhabit ecosystems across the globe, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Birds range in size from the 5cm (2 in) Bee Hummingbird to the 3m (10 ft) Ostrich.

Birds are categorised as the biological class Aves in Linnaean taxonomy. Phylogenetic taxonomy places Aves in the dinosaur clade Theropoda Aves and a sister group, the clade Crocodilia, together are the sole living members of the reptile clade Archosauria. Phylogenetically, Aves is commonly defined as all descendants of the most recent common ancestor of modern birds and Archaeopteryx lithographica.

The characteristic feature of all birds is the feather. The skeleton of birds and their internal organs are characterised but being reduced in weight and size to make them lighter as an adaptation to flight. The bones are hollow and thin walled. Many organs that were paired in other vertebrates and in the birds ancestors, such as kidneys, are reduced to one in birds.

There are over 9,200 species of birds known from around the world and they can be found in just about every habitat. In Australia there are 770 species of birds that have been identified as well as some extras that have arrived here by accident.

Bird Facts #2 Origins of birds

Birds evolved from small meat-eating dinosaurs around 150 million years ago.The earliest undisputed bird is Archaeopteryx lithographica known from 145 million year old rocks from southern Germany. If you’ve eaten chicken, you’ve eaten a dinosaur!

Bird Facts #3 Australia’s ancient birds

Birds have very fragile bones that do not fossilise as readily as bones of mammals and reptiles. As a consequence, we know a lot less about the history of birds in Australia than we know about mammals and reptiles. The earliest fossils of birds in Australia are from 110 million year old rocks western Queensland, Lightning Ridge in New South Wales and southern Victoria. All these fossils are isolated bones and not much is known about the birds they came from. A fossil feather from Victoria is also known from rocks of this age. The bones from Lightning Ridge are preserved as solid opal! Possibly the largest bird of all times is Dromornis stirtoni, known from 15 million year old sites in Central Australia. Some estimates suggest it weighed as much as 450kg!

Bird Facts #4 How Does a Bird Fly ?

Just like an airoplane’s wing, a bird’s wing is curved from front to back in a shape scientists call an airfoil. As the bird’s wing flaps, air flows faster over the upward-curved top than it does across the bottom. Fast-moving air has less pressure than slow-moving air, so there is more pressure pushing up on the wing than there is pushing down, creating what scientists call lift. Lift is what gets a bird (or an airplane) into the air and helps keep it there.

A baby bird leaving the nest knows instinctively how to flap its wings. But it takes time for a young bird to become good at flying—time to practice and time for muscles to strengthen.

• Gliding To glide, a bird stretches its wings out and sails along without flapping, dropping slowly toward the ground. Watch a goose or duck dropping down into a pond.
• Hovering The best hoverers, hummingbirds, can stop in midair, flapping their wings over 50 times a second. Hummingbirds can also fly backward on purpose. No other birds can.
• Soaring Soaring is like gliding, but a bird finds warm, rising air to carry it upward. Hawks, eagles, and vultures are all excellent soarers; so are storks, cranes, and many other large birds.
• Flapping This is the most common kind of flight, but it uses a lot of energy. Most really fast birds use flapping flight.

Bird Facts #5 The Fastest Fliers
Most songbirds can fly about 20 to 30 miles per hour, but Common Eiders can fly nearly 50 miles per hour, and Dunlins (shorebirds) once caught up with and passed a plane flying 100 miles per hour. Peregrine Falcons are considered the fastest birds. Experts think they may reach 200 miles per hour in dives.

Bird Facts #6 Bringing Up Chicks
The job of raising young birds begins with nest building. Once eggs are laid, the parents must keep them from getting cold, or the embryos inside will die. To make that job easier, incubating birds develop a brood patch—a featherless area on the breast that helps warm eggs with body heat.

Parenting Is Hard Work
Watch a nest of robins, House Finches, or other songbirds, and you’ll quickly realize how hard the parents work. The chicks must be fed every few minutes, from sunup to sundown, until they are old enough to leave the nest, usually about two weeks after they hatch. Even after the young birds have left the nest, they must be fed and protected from predators. Gradually, they learn to live on their own.

After Hatching
When songbird chicks hatch, they are naked, their eyes are closed, and they are able to do little more than hold up their wobbly heads and open their mouths. But young ducks and gamebirds, such as grouse and quail, are born covered in down and with their eyes open, able to feed almost immediately. A few hours after birth, baby Wood Ducks follow their mother out of the nest hole high in a tree—even though they can’t fly! The babies fall to the ground, bounce a few times, and then waddle off after their mother, unharmed by the drop.

Bird Facts #7 Why Do Birds Sing?
Birds sing to mark their territory and to attract mates. As though they were posting “No Trespassing” signs around their nests, birds sing songs that others of their species recognize and respect. The singing sounds beautiful and lighthearted but is serious business for the birds.

Spreading the Word
In most bird species, the male does all the singing (one exception is the Northern Cardinal, in which both sexes sing). The time of greatest activity is spring and early summer—the nesting season. Songs not only attract females, they scare away other males. Scientists think birds developed songs to spread their message over a long distance, even in forests where the birds are hidden.

Song and Dance Routines
Birds of the open country combine songs with courtship flights. If you are in a field where Bobolinks nest, you’ll see one male after another bounce into the air, circle on quivering wings, and sing a bubbling version of their name while gliding to earth.

Learning Bird Songs
Often the only way to tell birds apart is by their songs. To remember the songs, most birders put words to them—for example, the whichity-whichity-whichity of a Common Yellowthroat or the American Robin’s rolling cheerily-cheery-me. But not all birds sing their own songs. Some are mimics, imitating the songs of other species. Northern Mockingbirds, Brown Thrashers, Gray Catbirds, starlings, and Yellow-breasted Chats are all mimics; a single Brown Thrasher may sing 1,000 different songs.

Two Notes at Once
Bird song comes from an organ in the throat called the syrinx, which has two sides that vibrate. Some birds, like Wood Thrushes, can sing two different notes at the same time.

How Does a Bird Know What to Sing?
Scientists believe it’s partly instinct and partly learned—when a young bird hears an adult singing its species’ song, something is triggered in its brain, allowing the youngster to sing the same melody.

Bird Facts #8 Where Do Birds Lay Their Eggs?

What a variety of nests birds make to hold their eggs and later their chicks! Orioles weave deep bags using strands of plant stems. Bald Eagles and Ospreys return to the same nests year after year, adding sticks, driftwood, and other debris until the piles weigh half a ton or more. Gulls, terns, and Killdeer just scrape away dirt, making shallow depressions.

Bird Facts #9

Bird Facts #10

__________________________________________________________________

The above bird facts have been compiled from research conducted on

• Wikipedia
• ABC website http://www2.abc.net.au/science/birds/facts.htm
• Birds on Yahoo Kids Animals http://kids.yahoo.com/animals/birds