Presumably, good lighting would make inbound bullets as easy to see as if they were headed away from you. Not the same thing as saying they’d be easy to dodge.
I’ve watched hummingbirds squabbling with each other at a feeder and been quite inpressed with their speed, maneuverability and reaction time - when the action gets serious, it’s hard to follow with the human eye. But even at a slow 600fps, a bullet is outside their experience. So I can’t say how much success they’d have.
Having been a range coach, I can verify that you can, indeed, see a round in flight.
I’m not sure I categorize it as “easy”. In my experience the best place to observe this
is from directly behind the shooter. That’s on a 3 to 5 hundred yard rifle range with a
blue sky background. I’ve also supervised shooters on a pistol range, and while the
muzzle velocity of a pistol round is normally much slower than a rifle, I can’t recall
ever seeing a pistol round in flight. Of course the pistol range was only 15 to 25 yards
and they were firing w/ a large earthen berm as a backdrop.
I’ve never attempted to locate an incoming round, but I suspect it would be infinitely
more difficult.
That’s another factor. Animal’s often don’t react to things that outside their experience in terms of speed. Many animals could probably avoid being killed by cars on the roadway if they were able to comprehend the speed that it was coming at. Even if it saw a bullet coming, I’m not sure a hummingbird would recognize it as a threat in time to evade it.
They look very fast because of their size. But in absolute terms, they rarely get over 40 mph, as I mentioned previously. Birds have to have good reaction times in order to fly, but I’m not aware that hummers do much better than the 4/100 sec I cited above.
Probably not. But a human watching repeated demonstrations of .04 sec reaction time tends to be impressed.
[hijack]
I remember shooting a BB gun at bats when I was a kid in New Mexico (not much to do in Truth or Consequences at night). The bats would first dodge the BB and then roll out and chase it upword for a second or two. I guess the bat thought the BB was flying food.
[/hijack]
I would guess that BBs have a much lower airspeed than bullets, especially if they are being fired upwards and have a chance to decelerate. Perhaps someone who knows more about BBs can confirm this.
Ah yes, Truth or Consequences. We used to refer to it by its former name, Elephant Butt(e).
Hot Springs actually.
BBs are typically steel and slow down faster than lead. A Daisy Red Rider BBgun shoots at 280fps. A multi-pump air rifle like Daisy Powerline® Model 901 can shoot 750fps.
:smack: It’s been awhile since I went through there. Elephant Butt is in the general vicinity though, IIRC.
Assuming the bats might have been 100+ feet away, a Red Rider would give them more than 3/10s of a second to respond, even more accounting for slowing of the BB, which should be plenty of time. The bats were probably tracking them with sonar. It would probably be possible for a hummingbird to dodge a BB.
I have to post here the story told by a former colleague of my wife. When he was a young boy, his father was a park ranger at Zions National Park in Utah. He had a hummingbird feeder set up on the porch of the ranger station.
There was one hummingbird that was particularly agressive, and kept chasing other hummingbirds away from the feeder, much to the annoyance of the ranger. One day, he decided he had had enough, so he got his shotgun and decided to blast the agressive bird.
The hummingbird got away, but the blast did do a very nice number on the wall of the building, and the freezer that was on the other side of it.
Speaking of aggressive hummingbirds, the local male who guards my feeder is quite territorial. When I refill the feeder, he’ll buzz angrily about me. I ignore him of course (hummingbirds don’t ever actually attack humans, do they?), but hello little guy, I’m refilling your magic flower of infinite nectar. Some respect, please.
[Another Hijack]
Yep, Elephant Butte is in the reservoir. Turtleback Mountain is next to TorC. I visited the area for a few months to spend time with cousins. I was totally flabbergasted to discover that the turned the Rio Grande “on” and “off” every day at the reservoir.
[/Another Hijack]
I realize that BBs are slow and bats aren’t hummingbirds. That’s why I called it a hijack.
I do wonder about the hummingbird issue though. We assume that the bird may be quick enough and agile enough, but would the bird recognize the bullet in time and treat it as a threat, thereby avoiding it?
In other words, other than being wary of attacks from other hummingbirds, I can’t think of a reason for the hummingbird to have a defense mechanism geared towards bullet avoidance.
Sir, you are the cream that rises to the top of the Moderator Milk Bucket.
I’m thinkin’ the OP went down this path because if filmed at extremely high speeds, we can see how rapidly a hummingbird can shift locations in airspace, thus making one wonder if they can dodge an oncoming bullet.
Nature, She is a foul-tempered goddess. While possessed of the physical ability to shift locations in the air in a very fraction of a second, it is also possessed of well…a bird brain. I doubt it could process the danger factor fast enough. Also, it would require the kind of ability to focus on a rotating round object hurling towards one’e self at high speed. Usually that skill is found in baseball players.
Cartooniverse
We need to be careful about conclusions we draw from the observation that birds fall short of humans in reasoning power. For the sorts of things that birds tend to do (certainly including such things as evaluating and responding to indications of danger) their brains generally prove well suited to the task.
That’s right. They’re bugs.
Xema, I was being but half serious. Upon consideration of your comments, I must admit that many birds are capable of reacting to immediate threat very rapidly, which is why there are as many birds as there are out there. If they were more sluggish, there would be less birds.
Perhaps interesting to mention here that amazing video where a swallow was killed by a tennis ball during a game. One in zillions happenstance.
Seagulls are rats with wings, so my usual feeling for animals and particularly birds is suspended so I can say -
you got to shoot a .50 cal machine gun??? Presumably you were serving at the time?
and
that sounds really cool.