I feel slightly ridiculous for asking this.
No. They can easily be collected by shotgun. (It would probably be tough nailing one with a rifle, though.)
Not that I’d be able to answer anyway, but what precisely do you mean? Is the ‘can’ you’re referring to on a physical ability level, a sensory level, an intelligence level, etc.?
It’d be easier than a regular bird though, since they hover in place. 
:eek: [sub]sorry[/sub]
I regularly catch them with my hands when they get into our mud room, so I can take them out and release them. They are so incredibly light and fragil, I have to be very careful not to hurt them.
I did this last sumer with a humingbird that was in my shower. I held a towel in my hands and gently enfolded him, like I would a bee or spider. When I let him go he took off as fast as he could fly.
I once tried to shoot seagulls w/ a .50 Cal. machine gun. There were scores, if not hundreds of them following the boat. Actually I was just test firing the weapon, but I did fire a short burst into the middle of the flock. Didn’t hit a one and they were back into their scavenging formation in no time at all.
I doubt a hummingbird could detect an approaching bullet since it would likely be exceeding the speed of sound.
It’s hard. I suspect they are a little tougher than they look and feel. The first time, I was going to try to find something to ‘catch’ it in, but felt my hands would be the best to sort of cup it and not hurt it. It sort of scweeked me out at first. A 6’4" 210 lb guy that regularly wrestles with our dogs, and annoys the cats.
hehh. Humming bird. All 1 ounce of it.
Less than that. A Ruby-throat weighs about 3 grams, which means there are about 9 of them to the ounce.
Hummers are much tougher than they look, and actually are pretty sturdily built. I’ve probably handled hundreds of them.
Yeah, it wasn’t easy; I didn’t get him on the first grab. I was really afraid that i would hurt the litle gal. She and a few friends visit my garden all summer and although I planted honeysuckle and buddleia just for them to drink, I still don’t want to take a shower with her.
Technically, that would be called being hit by a piece of ‘shot’. And I think that is different than a ‘bullet’ as mentioned in the OP.
Any gun experts here who can comment on this?
Good Lord, Colibri. I acknowledge your expertise with birds but what would be the point in that? I’d think if you were trying to bring them down for collection purposes a shotgun wouldn’t leave enough to DO anything with.
I worked for a birding magazine a while back and was our with some hummingbird experts one day and we caught one to band it. That was absolutely the most pissed off bird I’ve ever seen. Everything in him said ‘if I were bigger I’d kill you all’.
Lama Pacos, I’m thinking both sense and physically able, like the Mythbusters catching a bullet myth. But I’m mostly wondering just how fast they are.
I’m impressed with those who have caught them. I usually see them zooming around fighting each other, and they don’t seem easy to catch.
I answered it that way because hardly anyone would ever think of trying to hit a hummingbird with a rifle. There would be no point, since that would almost certainly destroy the specimen. In any case, the answer is the same: no. The speed of a rifle bullet is far too fast for a hummingbird to perceive it coming and take evasive action.
If you are specifically trying to collect hummingbirds, you would use the finest shot, known as dust shot. Hummingbirds can, however, also be collected with smaller caliber bird shot. Many are not all that much smaller than the smallest passerines, and there is actually some overlap in size. There are many thousands of specimens in museums that were collected in this fashion in the 19th and 20th centuries. Usually they are hit by only one pellet, which doesn’t damage the bird so badly that a specimen can’t be made. I have, however, sometimes had to identify specimens consisting of half a hummingbird. (I don’t collect birds by shotgun myself, but have worked with other researchers who have done so.) It is preferable to use mist-nets if you wish to collect hummingbirds, but these have only been generally available for the last few decades, and in any case some high-flying species are difficult to collect that way.
As a specific point of comparison, hummingbird flight speed is typically about 25 mph, reaching perhaps 40 mph in dives. A hummingbird that was being shot at would either be perched or hovering, and even those flight speeds could not be obtained instantaneously.
This page indicates a relatively slow bullet (.38 Special) goes at 600 feet-per-second, or 400 mph, while a fast one (.22 Swift) goes at 4,000 fps, or 2,700 mph. If a hummingbird were 60 feet away, it would have 1/10 of a second to react and take evasive maneuvers if it took off when a .38 were fired. But since the speed of sound is 767 mph, effectively it would have only half that after the sound reached it.
Depending on conditions and distance, it might be barely possible that a hummingbird would startle at the sound of the gunshot and thus escape being hit if the bullet were relatively slow. However, even this would not be possible for a high-speed bullet, since this would exceed the speed of sound.
Same here. I caught one live once when it got trapped in a screened patio. The only reason I caught was that it flew into the screen and got its beak caught.
Hmmm. Do birds ever get their beaks injured when the fly into windows, since that’s what they are “leading” with?
Praying mantises apparently catch hummingbirds sometimes, which is a testament to the ferocity, for its size, of the mantis.
I don’t have an answer to the OP, but I once tried to shoot a gopher with a CO2 pistol (not a bb gun, a rifled barrel type) from a distance of about 6 feet, and the little sucker ducked back in his hole, literally dodging the bullet. I know I didn’t miss, because the bullet went into, and made a hole in a piece of wood that was just inches behind him.
Over that distance, he couldn’t possibly have “dodged the bullet” in a literal sense, that is, seen it coming and got out of the way. You undoubtedly made some moverment or noise prior to the bullet itself firing that spooked him and caused him to duck down and avoid being hit.
As a point of reference, a bird’s startle reaction time to a light flash as measured in the laboratory is about 38 milliseconds, or roughly 4/100 of a second. Note that that is the time to react at all, not to take evasive action. I doubt that a gopher’s would be any faster. I don’t know how fast a velocity your bullet might have had, but if we take the figure for a slow bullet above of 600 fps, your gopher would have had 1/100 of a second to react from the time the bullet left the muzzle.
In the example I gave above of a hummingbird at 60 feet, the bird would have had about 1/20 of a second to react (taking into account the speed of sound), or 5/100 sec. It might therefore just barely be possible for an animal to react at that distance if the bullet speed were slow enough. However, it would be evading the bullet because it was startled by the noise of the gun, not because it was taking deliberate evasive action relative to the trajectory of the bullet.
Note: “Shooting into the flock” is almost always going to result in zero hits. You need to pick a target. That’s why flocks are an effective defense against predators. It’s not at all easy to pick one bird out of a flock, or one antelope out of a herd, and keep it in the sights to the exclusion of all the others in the vicinity.
FWIW, I’ll note that under good lighting conditions (e.g. bright sun behind you) it’s easy to see .45 caliber pistol bullets in flight.
What if they are coming directly at you?