Those amazing hummingbird wings...and shoulders...and flight muscles...

If you've spent any time at all watching hummingbirds, you've no doubt marveled at their amazing maneuverability. Being able to accelerate and stop instantly, hummingbirds are the only birds who can fly up, down, forward, side to side, backward, and even upside down and backward, changing direction in microseconds and stopping on a dime to hover or perch. These tiny birds are fearless, often hovering inches from your face while staring you down! I love it when they do that. I always wonder what they are thinking, assuming they are operating on instinct, assessing the situation, but mostly making sure I'm not going to try to hone in on their nectar sources!

Hummingbirds use a figure-8 motion to fly and hover.

Their wings are set up differently than other birds, being

more like hands. Hummingbirds can not bend their wings

at the elbow and wrist, but they can rotate their wings at

the shoulder 180 degrees, allowing the figure-8 motion.

Click here for detailed information on hummingbird flight.

The average hummingbird's wings beat

about 50 times a second while hovering!

Hummingbirds have huge hearts for their body size.

The large and strong heart muscle is needed to

pump blood and oxygen to flight muscles that

are often 50% larger than other birds.

Beak Bit

A hummingbird's flight muscles (pectoralis majors and supracoracoideus) contain all red muscle fiber and are packed with mitochondria (which I remember from school are the powerhouses of the cell responsible for producing energy from glucose to make ATP). My brother, Bill (the personal trainer), taught me about red and white muscle fibers a long time ago when I started lifting weights with him. Red muscles fibers are used for sustained aerobic activity, while white muscles fibers are used for short bursts of anaerobic activity. It is logical then that hummingbirds would have all red muscle fibers with lots of energy producing mitochondria. Hummingbirds hover for so long to sip nectar, they need muscles that are capable of long-term endurance. The breast muscles of chickens, however, contain mostly white muscle fibers (the light meat). This type of fiber allows the bird to take off explosively to escape predators, but does not allow the bird to fly far. Most birds have a mix of white and red fibers. The hummingbird is the only bird that does not have any white muscle fibers in both sets of flight muscles. Click here for more detailed information on muscle fibers and mitochondria in birds.

This little bird is a formidable beast uniquely adapted

to live on nectar, a high-energy food source needed

to fuel a high metabolic rate and unique

musculature, but more on that later!

In addition to the sources I've sited above in links, I used information from the National Geographic Reference Atlas to the Birds of North America by Mel Baughman. This is one of my favorite books for little details about bird behavior.