A Furious Beating of Wings Trivia Quiz

Answer: ruby-throated hummingbird

The ruby-throated hummingbird (Archilochus colubris) ranges from Central America to nothern Canada, and it is the only breeding hummingbird of eastern North America. Its extremly short legs prevent walking or hopping. The hummingbird's rigid wings from shoulder to wingtip allow for power in both the upward and downward direction; therefore, it can generate both lift and propulsion.

This allows the hummingbird to hover more stably than any other bird. The ruby-throated hummingbird beats its wings about 55 times per second most of the time. During mating season, however, males perform courtship maneuvers for the females, especially a dive display. If the female perches, the male will fly back and forth before her with a wing-beat frequency of 200 beats per second, although it cannot keep this pace for very long.

Answer: club-winged manakin

The club-winged manakin (Machaeropterus deliciosus) has sacrificed many of the benefits of flight in exchange for song. In a 1997 study, Dr. Kim Bostwick of Cornell University's Museum of Vertebrates used a high-speed recorder to capture the manakin beating its wings at more than 100 times per second -- faster than a hummingbird in normal circumstances. When the wings met above the bird's back, a special feather, tip bent at a 45-degree angle, rubbed against another feather with seven separate ridges. Dr. Bostwick concluded this action produces tones similar to a violin.

Unlike most birds, which have sparse and hollow wing bones, the club-winged manakin's are dense and thick. These vibrations are emitted from the feather as sound, rather than absorbed into the bone. While rubbing the wings together is common in the insect world (e.g. crickets), manakins are alone in this in the bird world.

Answer: tawny owl

The stocky, medium-sized tawny owl (Strix aluco) of the woodlands of Eurasia has tiny hooks on its feathers that absorb the whooshing sound usually associated with wings cutting through the air. It can fly in near silence while roaming the countryside in search of prey.

These hooked feathers prevent the tawny owl from flying at lightning speed like a peregrine falcon, which may dive as fast as 390 kilometers per hour (242 mph) after agile prey like swifts and swallows. (Of course, these light feathers, lacking the heavy, waterproof oils of mallard ducks' feathers, prevent the peregrine from hunting in the rain!) Hunting during deadly quiet night, the tawny owl relies on surprise rather than speed to seize its prey.

Answer: vulture

True flight is distinct from gravitation gliding or parachuting (like a "flying squirrel") or from soaring, obtained by such larger birds as eagles and albatrosses by gliding on rising air columns. The bird recorded with the slowest flapping speed during true flight is the humble vulture, at only one beat per second.

"Vulture" refers to any scavenging bird of prey in the families Accipitridae (Old World) and Cathartidae (New World), and includes the carcass-eating vultures of the African plains, the Griffon vulture of the Middle East, and Californian and Andean condors.

Answer: midge

Insects require enormous amounts of energy to beat their wings rapidly. To lessen the demand for energy, insects have reduced the weight of the wings, the amount of drag created during wing movement, and the overall body size and weight. So it's not surprising that the fastest recorded wing-beat frequency was that of a small, lightweight ceratopogonid midge. In 1953, a scientist named O. Sotavalta used a beat-frequency oscillator to calculate that a midge of the genus Forcipomyia can attain a wing-beat frequency of 1046 Hz or 62,760 beats per minute!

A midge or a no-see-um is any member of a number of species of two-winged flies in the order Diptera that are often seen in swarms near water or marshy areas where it breeds. Midges resemble mosquitoes, except that they lack a proboscis (biting needle-nose) and therefore cannot transmit diseases. Although they are considered harmless in terms of public health, they can still be quite annoying in the summertime!

Fleas have no wings, but jump from place to place (or from dog to dog).

Answer: woodpecker

True flight is extremely draining. It requires enormous energy to beat one's wings to keep a bird's mass (or a bat's mass) airborne. Some birds, such as swifts, gulls, bee-eaters, and herons, will alternate between flapping their wings and gliding, which is called "undulating flight". Albatrosses and other large birds will do more soaring (gliding on rising air currents) with their wings outstretched. Hornbills, wagtails, woodpeckers, and other small birds, however, engage in "bounding flight", whereby they engage in short bursts of flapping, and then close their wings for a time. Because of their small size, the drag produced by their wings has a bigger effect than the flex of their wings.

Answer: to prepare for sudden flight

A diurnal (daytime) flier such as a butterfly will instinctively flap its wings occasionally as it rests as a necessary habit, to warm its muscles and remain prepared for instant flight from predators. It will open and close its wings, sometimes holding them vertical. Females of certain species, such as the eastern tiger swallowtail (Papilio glaucus), may spread their wings to release pheromones to attract males (but not generally the reverse). Honeybees also vibrate their wings to warm flight muscles, but this is less noticeable to people than the slow, graceful movements of colorful butterflies.

Answer: No

It is mathematically and physically impossible for humans to fly like birds. Aside from air sacs connected to their lungs to make them lighter and a lightweight skeleton with hollow bones, birds can fly because their wingspan and strength of their wing muscles are proportionate to their body mass. Mass increases faster than lift as you scale upward. A human being weighing 70 kg (154 lbs) would need a wingspan of 6.7m (22 ft), but the weight of such enormous, unwieldy wings would be so great that flight would be impossible anyway, and require the wings to be made larger to compensate, and so on in a vicious circle.

The closest man has come to flying like a bird has been through contraptions called ornithopters, which are aircraft that fly by flapping their wings. There have been some successful entirely human-powered ornithopters, such as Toronto's Snowbird, which first flew in 2010, but these require a tow-launch to get them airborne. They cannot take off from the ground like a bird.

Answer: bumblebee

In 1934, French entomologist Antoine Magnan and his assistant André Sainte-Lague determined that bee flight was aerodynamically impossible. The haphazard beating of their wings was physically insufficient to keep bees aloft. Yet they flew!

Michael H. Dickinson, a professor of bioengineering, along with his postdoc student and his colleagues at Caltech and the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, changed all that in 2005: "We're no longer allowed to use this story about not understanding bee flight as an example of where science has failed, because it is just not true." The researchers studied the flight of the bumblebee using both high-speed digital photography to freeze-frame bees in motion and a gigantic robotic markup of bees' wings.

So what is the secret of bumblebee flight? It's an unconventional combination of short, choppy wing strokes, a rapid rotation of the wing as it flops over and reverses direction, and a high frequency of wing-beating. The furious beating of wings is surprising because generally, the smaller the animal, the faster it flaps to compensate for decreased aerodynamic performance. Mosquitos can flap their wings 400 times a minute. Relatively larger insects beat their wings rather slowly, and to sweep them across a wide arc (nearly a semicircle). Bees, however, beat over a short arc of about 90 degrees, at a surprising frequency of 230 beats per second (bps). Fruit flies, 80 times smaller than honeybees, flap at only 200 bps. Bees have physiologically different flight muscles than other insects, so when bees need to generate more power, they increase the arc of their wing strokes, but keep flapping at the same rate. Other insects increase the frequency of flapping, a more efficient way to generate lift.

Answer: fingers

The family of bats was given the name Chiroptera, which mean "hand-wing" because its wings are made of a double layer of skin stretched over the bones of its arms and especially between its fingers, except for a short, clawed, thumb, which remains free for use in climbing.

The fingers are almost as long as the rest of the body. This gives bat wings a peculiar dexterity (literally) that no other creature can match, not even the hummingbird. The rigid bird's wing is more efficient at providing lift, but the flexible, dexterous bat's wing allows for astonishing maneuverability. Bats, of course, be they microbats like the vampire bats of South America, or macrobats like the flying foxes (fruit bats) of Asia and Oceania, are the only mammals that can achieve true flight.