Braving the Elements

Hummingbirds might look capricious as they flit from flower to flower, but they’re on a serious mission: they need to drink their body weight in nectar every day to stay alive.

With so much to eat and so little time, these little guys are the postal service of birds—neither rain nor wind can sway them from their mission.

We mean that literally—and here’s the video to prove it. Researchers at UC Berkeley’s Animal Flight Laboratory took hummingbirds into a lab’s wind tunnel to see how their tiny little bodies dealt with rainstorms and winds up to 20 miles per hour.

Then, they turned on the high-speed cameras—the kind that can capture as many 1000 frames per second.

The slow-mo video shows hummingbirds have more in common with boats than with other birds. While other species flap their wings up and down, hummingbirds move their wings through the air in a figure eight—the same way oars move through water.

Read more about the research at KQED.