Hummingbirds and a symphony’s strings section have a lot in common, it turns out. Smithsonian.com published a cool article about how a Yale researcher discovered that hummingbird feathers reverberate like strings instruments.
“When you think of bird songs, you probably think of songs that come from their mouths,” writes Smithsonian.com. “But hummingbirds have a whole different kind of music—one that comes from their feathers. As they fly, they spread their tail feathers, and the air passes through them, causing them to flutter. And that flutter, like a violin string, creates sound.”
In other words, hummingbirds don’t just fly to get from point A to point B, they fly to sing. And each species of hummingbird plays its own unique song.
Yale researcher Christopher Clark “has published several papers documenting hummingbird tail resonance,” Smithsonian.com writes. “He has also suggested in past papers that hummingbirds might have even evolved this form of singing before they found their voices.”
Have you ever thought about string resonance and the natural world? Will you look at hummingbirds differently now? What other phenomenons in nature might have ties to strings instruments?
Read the full article to learn more.