Hummingbird’s mating song comes from its tail feathers
SEP 09, 2011
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.025566
Science : The terrorizing wail of the Stuka dive bomber came from wing-mounted sirens called Jericho Trumpets. The male Anna’s hummingbird ( Calypte anna) also makes a characteristic noise when it dives, but the squeaky sound is meant to woo, not frighten, females. Three years ago Christopher Clark discovered that the hummingbird’s diving sound originates in its tail feathers. Now, as Science‘s Daniel Strain reports, Clark has identified the underlying mechanism. By putting tail feathers in a wind tunnel, Clark, who is now at Yale University, and his colleagues found that the feathers begin to flutter with sound-generating rhythm when the wind speed matches the bird’s diving speed of 7–20 m/s. Clark’s paper describing his research also appears in Science.
© 2011 American Institute of Physics
