How Do Hummingbirds Use Their Tongues and Beaks? :- Scientists spent years studying hummingbird tongues and beaks. Discover the intriguing tongue and beak uses of these tiny fliers.
How Do Hummingbirds Use Their Tongues and Beaks?
How Does a Hummingbird Eat With a Long Tongue and Beak?
A quick observation could lead one to believe that hummingbirds utilize straws similar to their long, thin, and delicate beaks. Nonetheless, scientists discovered that a hummingbird’s tongue splits into two tiny tubes around the beginning of the 19th century. Thus, they hypothesised that the birds’ nectar intake is dependent on capillary action. The same principle that makes a towel absorb water also works here. As it happens, the scientists were mistaken for a lot longer than a century.
Scientists have just recently discovered how a hummingbird uses its long, thin tongue to absorb honey. In 2011, a team of curious scientists and fast-moving photographers managed to decode the code. Scientists Alejandro Rico-Guevara and Margaret Rubega found that hummingbirds eat in a manner resembling a piston. Their tongues are full of nectar. Tiny forks at the tip open up to collect liquid. The bird can then absorb the nectar by compressing its tongue and retracting it when the bill closes. They lap at a high speed fifteen to twenty times per second.
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Hummingbirds Reach Sugar Water With Long Tongues
Reader of Birds & Blooms Cindee Darden of Marietta, Georgia wonders if hummingbirds can reach low enough to retrieve sugar water from partially filled saucer feeders at a height.
Kimberly Kaufman and Kenn: Indeed, they can. We frequently advise hummingbird feeders in the saucer design. Insects like bees cannot reach the sugar water since it is located far below the top entrance, making them easier to clean than some other varieties. Hummingbirds, however, have no trouble getting there. They have lengthy tongues that can reach far beyond the tip of the beak in addition to their long, narrow beaks. They can thus reach the nectar found deep within the long, tubular blooms in this fashion. They can also reach deep inside a feeder’s saucer.
Sugar water also attracts a wide range of other species, such as vireos, woodpeckers, orioles, tanagers, and warblers. It’s fun to watch them attempt to perch on hummingbird feeders so they can slide their tongues into the ports. The hummingbirds seldom get any more than annoyance from such encounters.
A Hummingbird Beak is Perfect for Pollination
Beak lengths and forms vary greatly among hummingbirds. Some species developed with their primary nectar-producing blooms. Several hummingbirds have bills tailored to specific flowers. The evolutionary link between pollinators like hummingbirds and bees and flowers that need pollination continues to reveal fascinating insights.
Lena Hileman of the University of Kansas found that penstemon flowers adapt to bees or hummingbirds. Bee-pollinated species are bluish or purplish with a flower tube large enough for bees to enter and a stamen positioned to deposit pollen on bee backs. In contrast, hummingbird-pollinated species are scarlet or orange-red with tiny apertures for the bill and/or tongue. Offering a landing pad is unnecessary.
All this coevolution has produced odd flowers and hummingbirds with unusual beak. Sword-billed hummingbirds from Andean South America are unique. This bird’s daggerlike bill is over 4 inches long, almost as long as its body. The sword-billed hummer can feed on long-tubed flowers, such as the pink northern banana passionflower, that other species cannot get because to its long bill.
Can Hummingbirds Open Their Beaks?
How they catch insects, a major component of their nutrition, is another mystery. Again using high-speed frame-by-frame imaging, researchers discovered that hummers may stretch their lower bill downward to broaden the base. They quickly snap the bill closed. Its aerial agility and ability to grab insects on the fly help hummingbirds get protein, lipids, amino acids, and other nutrients.
