A moving hill of sand in the desert is called... A. Dune B. Cliff C. Rock D. Mountain A. Dune

What did ancient people do to make rain?

A. We didn’t eat anything for three days.
B. They killed a mammoth
G. We walked with an umbrella and said “it seems like it’s starting to rain...”

B. They danced around the fire with a tambourine in their hands

What can't a tornado do?

A. Stand still
B. Lift the car into the air
B. Uproot a tree
D. Destroy the building

A. Stand still

In ancient times, the Chinese learned to make silkworms from cocoons...

A. Seasoning
B. Paper
V. Rezina
G. Silk

Where is the venom in a cobra?

A. On the tip of the tongue
B. In the tooth
B. On the tail
G. In the hood

Which animal's tail looks like an oar?

A. Bobra
B. Squirrels
V. Foxes
G. Bear

ShowHow do Eskimos greet each other?

A. Shake hands
B. Kissing
B. Rushing noses
G. Hugging

B. Rushing noses

What insect glides through water without drowning?

A. Ladybug
B. mayfly
V. Water strider
G. Dragonfly

V. Water strider

What is the name of the room on the ship where the sailors live?

A. Kelya
B. Kubrick
B. Apartment
G. Cabinet

B. Kubrick

What is formed in oyster shells?

A. Pearl
B. Corals
B. Gold
G. Almazy

What did the Japanese use instead of money before coins appeared?

A. Potatoes
B. Pearls
V. Shells
D. Rice and textiles

D. Rice and textiles

It used to be fashionable to wear glasses instead of...

A. Microscope
B. Binoculars
B. Telescope
G. Monocle

G. Monocle

Why does the water in the sea appear blue?

A. Because of algae
B. Because of the color of the bottom
B. Water reflects the sky
D. Due to dissolved salt

B. Water reflects the sky

What plant flower are they looking for on the night of Ivan Kupala?

A. Lily of the valley
B. Daisies
V. Fern
G. Juniper

V. Fern

Who helped the knight put on heavy armor?

A. Kucher
B. Squire
V. Dvoretsky
G. Lackey

B. Squire

In the Maasai tribe, a boy is considered an adult after...

A. Will overtake a cheetah
B. Defeat the lion
B. Will build a hut
D. Learn to read and write

B. Defeat the lion

What did the Indians do as a sign of reconciliation?

A. They buried the hatchet
B. All the arrows were broken
B. They clapped their hands
G. They stuck spears into trees

A. They buried the hatchet

Which of the following berries ripen first?

A. Lingonberry
B. Blueberry
V. Blueberry
G. Strawberry

G. Strawberry

Which of the following animals has the most acute hearing?

A. In a cat
B. At the hedgehog
B. At the bat
G. In a dog

B. At the bat

Columbus called the inhabitants of America Indians because...

A. He liked this word
B. The natives raised turkeys
D. The natives gave him a turkey

B. He thought he had sailed to India

What school of fish can destroy a large animal in a few minutes?

A. Karasei
B. Karpov
V. Piranha
G. Seahorses

V. Piranha

What device helps study the seabed?

A. Telescope
B. Airship
V. Lunokhod
G. Bathyscaphe

G. Bathyscaphe

In the depths of the swamp,...

A. Peat
B. Salt
B. Iron
G. Gold

Primitive people considered the cause of disease...

A. Viruses
B. Drafts
B. Evil spirits
D. Dirty hands

B. Evil spirits

Which of the following was invented first?

A. Typewriter
B. Computer
B. Printer
D. Copier

A. Typewriter

Which fish has both eyes on the same side of its body?

A. At the perch
B. At the shark
B. In trout
G. At the flounder

G. At the flounder

What were the first airplanes made of?

A. Made of wood
B. Made of rubber
B. Made of plastic
G. Made of metal

A. Made of wood

Which bird has the sharpest vision?

A. At the woodpecker
B. At the raven
V. At the eagle
G. At the starling

This insect rolls dung into balls.

A. Termite
B. Scarab
V. May beetle
G. Cockroach

B. Scarab

What is the name of the cook on a ship?

A. Gunner
B. Quartermaster
V. Boatswain
G. Kok

What did the Marquise de Pompadour come up with to appear taller?

A. Earrings
B. Stairs
V. Stilts
G. High heels

G. High heels

Glass is made...

A. From sand
B. Made of plastic
B. From iron ore
G. From stones

A. From sand

Sailors soaked their clothes with resin...

A. For insulation
B. So that it does not tear
B. So that insects do not grow in it

D. So that it does not let water through

"Ant cows" are called...

A. Gusenits
B. Kuznechikov
V. Aphids
G. Medvedok

Spiders produce webs...

A. From the hind legs
B. From the abdomen
B. From the front legs
G. From the jaws

B. From the abdomen

What bird can fly tail first?

A. Toucan
B. Parrot
V. Nandu
G. Hummingbird

I don’t know about you, but I really love watching birds, I love listening to their conversations, recognizing them by their voices. It is not difficult to observe them, since they are everywhere, and each has its own habits, its own unique song. There are birds that are very fast, there are excellent hunters, and there are birds that are so bright that their appearance is simply mesmerizing. I think many people are asking questions: which bird is the fastest in the world, which is the most beautiful? And I want to tell you about an amazing bird that flies not only forward, but also backward.

Which bird flies tail first?

Everyone knows that birds from the Hummingbird family are the smallest on Earth. Their size ranges from 5 to 20 cm, and weight from 2 to 20 grams. So, they are not only the smallest, they are also the only birds in the world that can:

• fly sideways and even backwards;
• stop abruptly;
• flutter in place.

The ability to stay in one place in the air greatly helps birds when collecting nectar, because their legs are so fragile that you can’t stand on them for a long time. Their wings, on the contrary, are very strong, and differ in that they are attached to the body only in the shoulder area. They work with them so quickly that they are capable of making 200 strokes per second, which leads to a slight buzzing sound.

Also, a record among birds is the flight speed of these babies, which is approximately 100 km per hour. Hummingbirds are very active and energetic birds, their whole life is spent in motion, and in order to keep themselves in shape, they need to eat well.

What does a hummingbird eat?

Hummingbirds obtain all the necessary nutrients from nectar, which is taken from a flower. Having flown up to it, they hover next to it, then plunge their long beak into the flower, and, making swallowing movements, suck the nectar. They fly around up to 2 thousand flowers per day.

Many people think that hummingbirds only feed on nectar. This is wrong. The diet of many species consists of small insects, which they find on leaves or flowers.

These little ones are considered the most insatiable birds in the world, as in a day they eat an amount of food that is twice their weight.

03.06.2012 - 11:15

This bird can fly not only with its tail forward, but also to the right, and to the left, and up, and down, clearly maintaining the orientation of the body, that is, without wasting time on turns, this amazing bird, the hummingbird, is able to move.

Fantasy bird

It could be compared to a radio-controlled model. But, I’m afraid, the comparison will not be in favor of the latter - not a single model, even the most modern, even constructed in the most secret laboratories of the richest countries in the world, has ever been comparable in characteristics to the hummingbird.

Judge for yourself. From the Florida Peninsula (USA) to the Yucatan Peninsula (Mexico) is about a thousand kilometers. When migrating, hummingbirds cover this path in 20 hours. No stops, no breaks for lunch or sleep. Regardless of the weather conditions in the Gulf of Mexico. In storms and storms. The famous American hurricanes are also no problem for hummingbirds. And this very difficult flight is performed by birds weighing only seven grams.

Some species of hummingbirds fly to the Canadian Rockies while the ground is still covered with snow. At the same time, travelers manage not only to hatch eggs there, but also to maintain their temperature 25°C higher than the surrounding air.

Scientists have long wondered: how can such a small bird “keep” such a high body temperature? It turned out that hummingbirds eat a lot, consuming about twice as much food per day as they weigh themselves. Only in this way can they provide themselves with increased metabolism and a constant temperature.

Among the unique anatomical features of this bird, a very powerful heart should be mentioned: it is almost three times larger in volume than the stomach and occupies half of the body cavity. This is due to the high mobility of birds and rapid metabolism. The heart rate of hummingbirds is extraordinary: in some species it reaches a thousand beats per minute.

Hummingbirds also don’t freeze because their feathers warm them. Among all other small and medium-sized birds, hummingbirds have the best insulation due to the greater number of feathers per inch of body. Moreover, birds are able to lower their metabolism and fall into torpor, again to conserve energy.

It’s worth adding here that the hummingbird’s feathers themselves resemble precious stones in color. In the sun they shimmer and change color.

The bird weaves its nest from blades of grass, and its size is the size of a walnut shell. And hummingbird eggs are the size of a pea.

Recently, ornithologists have discovered another remarkable ability of this amazing creature. It turns out that “the hummingbird has a brain only the size of a grain of rice, but uses it perfectly,” as the study put it. It turned out that hummingbirds remember information well. For example, the basis of the diet of these birds consists of small insects and flower nectar - this is how hummingbirds avoid flowers that they have recently emptied, but return to where food is still contained.

Such a role

It is for obtaining nectar that the beak of a hummingbird is intended, which in all species is very thin and long, and in some, for example, in the sword-billed hummingbird, it is much longer than its owner. Thus, representatives of this species also turn out to be the longest-beaked birds in the world. As a rule, hummingbirds have a straight beak, but in some it bends slightly downwards.

The hummingbird's language is also unique in its own way. It is a long thin tube with a fringe at the end. Having flown up to the flower and hovering in the air in front of it, the hummingbird inserts its beak into the flower and, only slightly lifting the beak, sticks out the tip of its tongue. Then, with strong swallowing movements, the nectar is pumped into the oral cavity, enters the esophagus and then, bypassing the stomach, flows into the intestines. If there are small insects in the nectar, they end up in the stomach.

Hummingbirds collect spiders and insects from leaves and branches, also hovering in front of them, and sometimes catch “food” directly in flight. Hummingbirds feed their chicks by feeding them beak-to-beak nectar, not sitting on the edge of the nest, but fluttering their wings next to the “house.”

Hummingbirds also play another important role in nature - they draw nectar from flowers, pollinating them. Many flowers are designed in such a way that only the smallest bird can assist in pollination. Moreover, depending on the shape of the “reservoir,” the beaks of individual hummingbird species are also different. Nectar is sucked from flat flowers with a short beak, and from deep, funnel-like flowers - with a long and narrow beak.

Tail singing

But the most interesting property of hummingbirds is the ability to sing... with their tail.

It is known that many birds make sounds not only with the larynx, but also with other parts of the body, for example, by clicking their beaks or vibrating their feathers in flight. Until recently, there was no consensus among ornithologists about how the male of one of the hummingbird species makes a loud sound, reminiscent of a short but very shrill whistle. American researchers from the Museum of Zoology in Berkeley (California) have found that hummingbirds have a tail for this purpose.

A “solo” looks like this: a male hummingbird rises into the air about 30 meters and flies down in an arc. In this case, the arc is located in the same vertical plane with the sun, and the bird tends towards it, due to which the purple feathers on the head and neck of the hummingbird shine brighter and attract the female. At the bottom of the arc, flying over the “chosen one” at a speed of about 80 kilometers per hour, the male “whistles.”

Research has shown that this loud sound occurs precisely in those split seconds when a hummingbird spreads its tail. To conduct an experiment in a wind tunnel, scientists removed several outer tail feathers from the hummingbird's tail (animal advocates needn't worry; the bird will grow new feathers in a couple of weeks). It turned out that these feathers are precisely what “whistle”: the sound arises because they vibrate in the air flow. In general, tail singing is not characteristic of most species of hummingbirds; this ability probably arose relatively recently during evolution. In any case, scientists are going to continue research.

If, of course, there is someone to investigate. For the sake of beautiful plumage, hummingbirds were exterminated in very large numbers, which sharply reduced the number of these birds. In the century before last, millions of their skins were exported to Europe from South America and the Antilles. From the West Indies alone, sometimes up to 400 thousand skins a year came to London markets. Currently, more than a dozen species of hummingbirds are listed in the Red Book of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, of which four species are considered endangered.

Interesting facts about hummingbirds:

Tiny hummingbirds consume a hundred times more food per unit weight than elephants. The metabolic rate of these birds is so high that even a six to eight hour interval between meals would threaten them with death from exhaustion.

But this does not happen: the hummingbird’s body seems to become numb at night - their temperature drops from the usual 40-45 degrees Celsius to the ambient temperature, and their metabolism slows down 10-15 times. And in the morning, the hummingbirds “come to life” again and begin to tirelessly forage for food.

In total, there are 350 species of hummingbirds. These fragile-looking creatures are the toughest in the animal world. They are found in very different, often even harsh climates from Alaska to Argentina, from the deserts of Arizona to the coast of Nova Scotia, from the Brazilian jungle to the snow line of the Andes. (Interestingly, these birds live only in the New World.)

German ornithologist Karl Schuchmann believes that “hummingbirds exist on the edge of what is possible for vertebrates, and quite successfully.” They are able to live in captivity for up to 17 years. At rest, a hummingbird's heart beats at a rate of five hundred beats per minute! Over its entire life, it contracts four and a half billion times - almost twice as much as the human heart during seventy years of life.

Once hummingbirds die, their thin, hollow bones almost never become fossils. Therefore, scientists were quite surprised when they discovered fossil birds that were thirty million years old. Perhaps among them there are also ancestors of hummingbirds: they have the same long thin beaks, a shortened humerus of the wing with an enlarged process that allowed the limbs to rotate in the shoulder joint, which means the birds could hang in the air.

Hummingbirds are featured on the coat of arms of Trinidad and Tobago.

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Hummingbirds are the smallest birds on Earth. The miniature birds flap their wings 90 times per second, their heart beats 1,200 times per minute and they are the only ones capable of flying backwards.

1. Hummingbirds come from America, from southern Alaska and Labrador to Tierra del Fuego. There are more than 300 species of hummingbirds in the world. (Photo by Jaime Saldarriaga | Reuters):

2. Small birds belong to this order. This includes the smallest birds on Earth (size 5.7 cm and weight 1.6 g). At the same time, there are hummingbirds of larger sizes, the length of which reaches up to 21 cm, and their weight reaches up to 20 g). (Photo by Jaime Saldarriaga | Reuters):

3. The largest species is the gigantic hummingbird (Patagona gigas), with a straight long beak and a forked tail, pale brown above with a green sheen, reddish-brown below, with a gray-yellow rump, 21.6 cm long; found in most of the western countries of South America, also found at an altitude of 4000-5000 m. In the extreme south it is a migratory bird. And, no, that's not him in the picture. (Photo by Jaime Saldarriaga | Reuters):

4. Their flight is extremely fast (up to 80 km/h), agile and maneuverable, reminiscent of the flight of Lepidoptera (butterflies). In flight, small species make a buzzing sound with their wings, making up to 80-100 beats per second, while large species make only 8-10 beats per second. (Photo by Jaime Saldarriaga | Reuters):

5. The movement of the wings is so fast that their outlines completely merge; very often they remain motionless in front of flowers thanks to the rapid flapping of their wings, like twilight butterflies. (Photo by Jaime Saldarriaga | Reuters):

6. At rest, the heart of a hummingbird beats at a frequency of 500 beats per minute, and during physical activity (flight) - 1200 or more, and during the life of this baby, the heart beats 4.5 billion times, which is almost twice as many beats, than the human heart beats over 70 years. (Photo by Jaime Saldarriaga | Reuters):

7. And the hummingbird can fly not only forward, but also backward, and also sideways! Apart from hummingbirds, no one else can fly backwards. (Photo by Jaime Saldarriaga | Reuters):

8. Metabolism dictates its own rules: a 3-gram hummingbird sometimes consumes 43 grams of sweet nectar per day! 14 times its own weight! (Photo by Jaime Saldarriaga | Reuters):

9. In general, the hummingbird is considered the most insatiable bird on Earth - it can drink up to 120 times in 16 hours. When a hummingbird drinks, it dips its tongue into the neck of the flower 20 times per second. At the same time, it does not simply plunge into liquid and emerge. A new analysis of the drinking habits of more than 30 species of hummingbirds shows that the tongue actually wraps around the liquid, scooping it up. (Photo by Jaime Saldarriaga | Reuters):

10. In experiments, using cameras capable of taking ultra-fast sequences of frames, the moments of a hummingbird entering a dive were captured. At the same time, the birds reached a speed of almost 400 of their bodies per second. (Photo by Jaime Saldarriaga | Reuters):

11. If you compare the length of a hummingbird's body with its speed, their ratio is "greater than that of a fighter jet with afterburner turned on, and greater than that of a space shuttle at the moment of entry into the earth's atmosphere." In the final stage of the dive, when hummingbirds open their wings, they demonstrate such instantaneous braking that no other living organism can achieve it. (Photo by Jaime Saldarriaga | Reuters):

Filming of these hummingbirds took place on July 28, 2016 near the city of Cali, Colombia. See also "" and "".

I think that this question is not entirely suitable for a children's quiz; not every adult will be able to answer it correctly right away. To be honest, I had to look in the encyclopedia to get an answer to the question about a bird that can fly tail first.

First, let's look at all the answer options and give a little description of these birds:

The toucan is one of the representatives of the woodpecker order, which has a huge bright beak. However, the large beak does not prevent these birds from flying well.

Rhea is very similar in appearance to the African ostrich, but the degree of their relationship has not been proven. Can't fly at all, only runs.

The parrot is a colorful bird that lives mainly in jungles and tropical forests. It is very popular among bird lovers and some species can even be trained at home for spoken language.

Hummingbirds are one of the smallest birds in the world and live mainly in the Americas. It has its own unique feature - the only bird in the world that can fly backwards.

As we understand, the correct answer to the question posed is the hummingbird bird. Only she can fly tail first.