True Facts: The Hummingbird Warrior

this is the hummingbird hummingbirds are tiny little beards so tiny that mothers are sometimes mistaken for humming beards and the blue jays you know how they are they tease where's your poopa and then the hummingbirds like it's pronounced pupa and i'm not a moth but if you start correcting the pronunciation of a bully you're a nerd bird and they're like hey nerd bird are you gonna stick your freaky fingernail tongue into some flowers sexy hole and to be honest that one is actually fair they do have a freaky little tongue we'll get back to that in a second but you don't just wake up one day saying you want a deep tongue of flour just like no one has a to-do list that includes trying to snort cocaine residue out of a shag carpet it's just the sad outcome of a very serious addiction flowers contain nectar which contains sugar and hummingbirds are a dick tattoo it sorry addicted to it jerry i don't need the phonetics i can read but this isn't some hiding a bunch of kitkats in random drawers around the apartment kind of sugar addiction you know who you are these little hummers drink more than twice their body weight in nectar each day using their tongue and this is no ordinary run-of-the-mill tongue the back part is fleshy fleshy like ours but it has a bone in it don't judge the long front part however is made of keratin like a fingernail and this fingernail tongue grows in a curious shape if we zoom in you can see that a cross-section of the tongue looks like two tadpoles that got into an argument on closer inspection it looks like a thumb smear wipe of mucus on a windshield but magnified further it resembles a fancy reclaimed wood cheese board you got as a gift but don't use because cheese gets in those little cracks and holes however if you zoom in all the way you know what that looks like that is the pattern on a mead composition notebook the very pattern that contains a spot that looks precisely like a cross section of a hummingbird beak anyway you can see that it forms two not rolled up all the way fruit roll-ups i know what you're thinking two straws right wrong as if nature ever does things the easy way even if you close the tubes up they back into that fleshy bit so no sucky sucky instead dr margaret rubega and her team discovered these are flexible mechanical pumps when the hummingbird sticks out its tongue it smushes these tubes in its beak parts a thin layer of water molecules keeps it smushed even though it wants to return to its tube shape on contact with the nectar the whole thing springs open and pulls the nectar into the tubes the loaded tongue is pulled back into the beak where the nectar is squeezed out during the next tongue flattening and this all happens very quickly 15 licks every second and they will take over a thousand of these drinks a day that's a lot of lick friction and so this fingernail tongue is continuously growing as the tip wears down but these little bad asses make the most of everything and even the wear and tear is an engineering marvel watch what happens right at the end of the tongue [Music] like a party the tip of the hummingbird tongue is the ultimate split end the two tubes separate and begin to fray sort of like the leaves on a tropical plant the resulting structure looks like two tiny feathers that fairies might tickle each other with when this bifurcated tip enters the nectar the fronds spread out like a centipede trying to give a hug this little nectar mop increases the surface area at the tip of the tongue and helps to get into those hard-to-reach places inside a flower's naughty bits as it exits the nectar the whole structure closes back up trapping additional sugar sauce that wasn't pulled up into the tubes when a hummingbird says just the tip you might be licked dry in an instant jerry that's a moth so anyway they're out there flip-flapping all over the place hitting the juice with their freaky tongue and they're tweaked out you've been there it's like cramming for a test with a two liter of dr pepper all jittery and you have to pee every minute i'm telling you everything's up to 11 with these tiny puffball junky birds and when they're hopped up looking for that next flower fix their little wing parts are going at 30 to 40 flaps per second and their heart forget about it well not before i say it it's like a speed core set at an edm concert somewhere between 500 and a thousand beats per minute now forget about it and they run hot you can see it on these tie-dye cam freaking science hippies 104 degrees fahrenheit which is approximately look it up on google yourself celsius freaking metric system takes all the romance out of measurement i want my units based on the size of a king's unit that's what a load is one king's loaf anyway these jacked up hummers are caught in this crazy trade-off if you want to take a thousand drinks you have to be quick in all directions so you get small and you can't store what you eat as fat or it'll slow you down so you end up constantly converting the sugar you eat to energy so that you can get more sugar to eat and if you stop you starve it is a vicious bicycle jenny it's cycle it's not short for bicycle so with all that going on you can't blame them for being a little bit aggro sometimes and by a little bit i mean crouching tiger echo hummingbirds sort of agro they can be vicious little bastard birds it's like mma but on a trapeze and with swords it's a jetly movie hummingbirds will often aggressively defend the territory they have remarkable spatial memory and their territory can be a long path of flowers that they visit each day referred to as a trap line but of course a well-hung feeder is the mother lode janet freud would have a field day with that sentence you need help your background patio is basically a summerslam wrestling event with tiny birds beaking the shirt out of each other some species take it a step further and the males have full-on weaponized beaks complete with dagger-like serrated toothy things on their tomia the outside borders of their jaw parts as well as hooked tips the fairies don't even try to ride these ones they're too dangerous i mean if they find a dead one they'll take the beak off and make two saws out of it use them to cut down twigs to make toothpicks that's how they're made and that's how fairies put food on the table and i'll put in a cup if you say otherwise these shorter weapon beaks are most likely less efficient for feeding but the trade-off allows them to defend the flowers that they like the most sending the other hummingbirds who don't want to deal with crazy farther afield now you can imagine that after a long day of running on fumes all tweaked out and getting the crap beaked out of you you'd start feeling ridden hard and put away wet what is that jerry that sounds dirty it's about what jerry we don't use that word oh i see horse you're saying a horse well that's perverted jerry when cold or darkness makes it too costly in energy for the hummingbird to keep up its habit it goes into something called torpor the hummingbird version of a sugar crash it's extreme it's like it did you try unplugging it and plugging it back in kind of crash its body temperature can drop more than 40 degrees matching the temperature of the air around it its heart rate drops from over a thousand beats per minute to under a hundred this allows the hummingbird to use just a fraction of the energy it expends during the day which prevents the bird from starving to death in this state the bird is offline and cannot respond to outside stimuli two tendons in their landing gear lock their little bird feet in place so they can hang on even if the naughty teenage fairies come and tip them over in the middle of the night when it's time to wake up it can take them up to 20 minutes to shiver and shake their way up to normal body temperature and of course the first thing they do is hit the sauce as springtime approaches the hummingbirds start to get horny and they prepare to do a kind of reverse spring break while college students fly south to sip on drinks with flowers in them and get laid in places like cabo san lucas hummingbirds leave places like cabo san lucas and fly north to sip on flowers with drinks in them and get laid in places like toledo i'm not busting on toledo i'll leave that to the hummingbirds sorry but first they must fatten up for the journey they will nearly double their weight so they have the energy reserves for these intense journeys that can even take some of these little chubby puffballs across the gulf of mexico hummingbirds eat insects in order to round out their diet with vital amino acids and fats although it looks a bit like trying to catch a fly with tweezers their bottom beak part is flexible and both bends downward and widens when they open their mouths right before it all snaps shut they are not above stealing food directly from a spider's web what it watches no less it's the second crappiest thing they do to the spider after they migrate they are ready to bump uglies so to speak and it's like the balcony scene in romeo and juliet but the agro musical theater version males put on quite a show little aerial dances where they puff out their gorgets which is like a built-in ascot but in terms of impressing the females the males have one more trick up there well you'll find out with a female perched below the male climbs high up into the sky above her when he is satisfied with his ups he turns around and heads downward in an arc flapping his little wings to gain speed in a dive that can reach nearly 50 miles per hour as he approaches the bottom of the ark just above the female he flashes his gorget and makes a sound that was an anna's hummingbird but each species makes its own sound the black chinned hummingbird makes this sound the rufus hummingbird sounds like this and then there's the calliope hummingbird the smallest bird in north america it does a little barrel roll right at the end let's listen for science let's slow that down a little bit more for science [Music] these sounds are not made with their mouth parts they're made with their butts sort of you may have noticed at the bottom of the ark the male fans out his tail feathers dr chris clark and his team put some of these feathers into a wind tunnel i mean if you had your own wind tunnel you'd put all kinds of crap in not a baby not mayonnaise but definitely the butt feathers of a bird they found that these tail feathers are specialized to make sound as air rushes past them different feathers in different positions make different sounds sometimes feathers will even interact with one another one function of the hummingbird dive is to build up speed so they can use their butt feathers as an instrument imagine him pressing your date on a picnic by climbing up a large hill then running down as fast as you can and right when you pass them spreading your cheeks and that is how a hummingbird do if the female is up for it then they will rub their cloacas together not totally sure how the position works lots of feathers in the way but there's rubbing then the male flicks right off and the female is left to do everything else and she's good at it too she builds a tiny nest from fluffy things like moss lichen and dandelion down to weave it together she will steal the silk from spider's webs i told you like a good pair of sweatpants the nest is designed to stretch as the eggs hatch and the bebbies grow during this time she must protect her nest as well as find food both for herself and to puke into her waiting baby's beaks to keep her babies warm at night she will avoid torpor and keep her little engine running day and night all of this and then one day they are grown ready to venture out it what was that seriously jerry i'm trying to do the ending and you have a psychedelic bird baby taking a right on screen well that's ruined i mean the point was gonna be don't do drugs not a lot of them anyway everything in moderation except moderation you do that all the time i mean if you wake up and your tongue is in the shape of a crack pipe like that's a good sign i mean it's a bad it's a good sign that it's bad the hummingbird is a pollinator as it sticks its beak into the flower's hole it gets the flower's male stuff all over its face jerry i can't read this i don't care if that's how the flowers get all pregnant it's smut jerry that's a moth you

Channel: zefrank1

Views: 3,144,045

Rating: 4.9597034 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: Biagyb7AcK8

Length: 12min 12sec (732 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 14 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/DrzombieJesus01]

Zefrank is so freakn funny

[u/MrMaxPowers247]

I have fed hummingbirds for years and years. Absolutely love them! I have 6 feeders. At one time I had been buying 25lb bags of sugar to make food just for them. Huge stock pot that would do 4-5 gallons at a time. Literally would go through a gallon a day. I had stopped for a while because life and I got kinda overwhelmed with the constant chore. Got back into it a couple years ago, built back a huge charm. Then one day I witnessed what can only be described as a murder. Sure they fought a bit, you had a few that were super mean and try to keep the feeders to themselves but I had too many and spaced far enough away that one bird couldn't defend all of them. Then one day I came outside to see one bird flying from the feeder to under a chair, back and forth. Super weird behavior, so I continued to watch and was trying to see why he was flying so low. I then see another hummingbird on the ground. The aggressor would fly down land on it a violently stab the other one with his beak then fly up get a drink from the feeder and then back to murder. I tried to take the injured one away and keep it safe. The calls from the other birds kept making it flinch in fear. I took it to a quiet spot. I got it to drink a little but it was too much and died within a couple hours. That was the last time I filled up the feeders. I thought about filling one up the other day and just thought "not yet". I've seen a bunch of horrible stuff in life, not sure why but that one is up there in awful memories

[u/Soft-Rains]

The dude seems to be back into it. I'll watch them off/on but the recent ones are as good as the older ones again. Happy to see.

The quality on the biology parts is really high this video which is cool.

[u/f0rgottenr3bel]

holy crap its twelve minutes lol

[u/Scout_022]

related ancdote: I was standing outside once, minding my business, when I heard from behind me a loud flapping. it was leathery, but far too loud to be an insect, so in my mind it was a humming bird. so i turn around expecting to see a humming bird but it was a terrifying preying mantis flying straight at my head.

I've never run so fast in my life.

[u/Biofreak42069]

They prepare to do a kind of reverse Spring Break. While college students fly South to sip on drinks with flowers in them and get laid in places like Cabo San Lucas, hummingbirds leave places like Cabo San Lucas and fly North to sip on flowers with drinks in them and get laid in places like...Toledo.

7:19 I'm dying lol

[u/LillyTheElf]

Mad good. We have a charm that lives near us and they go crazt on the feeder

[u/seedanrun]

a little bit more...for science

such great narration. Yet the best detailed science about the birds too.

[u/MozzLand]

.