Hummingbirds hunt bugs! Who knew?! Interesting article in "Nature"

[astro]

Birds catch flies with bendy beaks

Hummingbirds have bendy lower beaks to help them catch insects, research reveals. The flexibility allows long-beaked birds to open their mouths wide enough to hunt on the wing.

Hummingbirds use their long, narrow beaks to probe flowers for nectar, but they also need insects for essential nutrients. It wasn’t clear how they could catch them; birds that hunt flying insects usually have short beaks to help them open their mouths wide.

So Gregor Yanega and Margaret Rubega from the University of Connecticut in Storrs filmed 70 captive hummingbirds of three species, including the ruby-throated hummingbird Archilochus colubris, at 500 frames per second as the birds caught fruit flies.

One gulp of an insect lasts about a second, the duo found. Slow-mo showed that each bird bent its lower jaw downwards as it neared its prey. The beak’s bend varied between birds and between snacks, the researchers report in Nature1.

This type of jaw movement has never been spotted before, says Yanega.

[Hal_Briston]

Huh…and they seem like such peaceful little birds, too. I guess it’s kinda like the way scientists recently discovered that butterflies are actually carnivores, but only swallow people whole when no one is looking.
What?

[teela_brown]

I always assumed that not only did they pick at spider webs for the nest-building material, they were also getting a tasty spidey-snack at the same time.

But catching bugs on the wing? Sharp little birds, those.

[artemis]

@Hal Briston

Huh…and they seem like such peaceful little birds, too.

“Seems” is right - hummers are some of the most pugnacious birds on the planet. They zealously guard their territory and will fight viciously (sometimes to the death) to drive other hummingbirds out of it.

(In fairness to the birds, the flowers they feed on yield very little nectar, so the hummer has to spend nearly all its waking hours feeding in order to avoid starving to death. Allowing another bird to share its flower patch might mean the demise of the hummer owning that territory.)