Watch This: Hummingbirds Fly Forwards and Backwards With Equal Ease

Scientists took high-speed videos of hummingbirds in flight to see which was harder, flying backward or forward?

80beats
By Sophie Bushwick
Sep 28, 2012 2:00 PMMay 23, 2020 10:40 PM
blue-chinned sapphire hummingbird - shutterstock
A male blue-chinned sapphire. (Credit: Chelsea Sampson/Shutterstock)

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Hummingbirds are incredible flyers, with the ruby-throated hummingbird beating its wings 80 times every second, an ability that inspired this blog's name. These tiny birds can fly forwards, hover, and are the only known birds to fly backwards as well. But although zooming backwards is the rarest of the hummingbird's flying tricks, a paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology reveals that it takes no more energy than moving forwards.

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