I can lick him Ma!
One from the archives (It's holiday break until 1/4/10)
Many of us know that chameleons have really long tongues. But not so many know that cute little hummingbirds do as well. I got this pic of an Anna's Hummingbird after she'd just eaten and was cleaning her tongue by zipping it in and out. This happens pretty quickly so you've got to be quick on the trigger if you want to capture it. And by "pretty quickly" I mean it takes milliseconds.
Her tongue isn't white; that's just the light reflecting off of it. You can see how fast they can flick it out and reel it back in if you have a hummingbird feeder with transparent walls in the portion containing the nectar. It's fast, believe me.
They don't suck up the nectar, as we might with a straw, but rather flick their tongues into the liquid and then retract the tongue into their mouths, much as an anteater eats ants (or termites).
And how small are they? Well, let me put it this way. They only weigh three to four grams. (And if you don't recall your metric, there are 28.5 grams in a single ounce). In other words, a pound of them would mean over a hundred hummers.
- And that's today's word from the bird
Great bit of info. When I lived in Arizona, we used to have a female Anna's hummingbird visit us on a daily basis. If our feeder ever ran dry, she'd hover in front of our window and scold us, then zip off to the next feeder. If it wasn't refilled by the time she came back, she'd express her displeasure more graphically, all over the window.
We didn't live too far from the Ramsey Canyon Nature Conservancy, where there are more different species of hummers than anywhere else in North America. Really cool place. You can learn more here:
http://www.sabo.org/birding/huacspv.htm#ramsey http://www.nature.org/wherewework/northamerica/st… http://www.ramseycanyoninn.com/
Arizona is, as I'm sure you know, THE place in the US for hummingbirds. We get 4 or 5 around my place. The Anna's are residents and a ton of fun to watch.
"Arizona is, as I’m sure you know, THE place in the US for hummingbirds"
I've only been to Arizona once, but it seemed to be THE place for all sorts of birds. Granted, it was a field trip with a college biology class, including several PhD students who study birds, so we were actually paying attention. But the variety of different habitats we visited all seemed to have very nice avian diversity.
Have you ever seen an okapi's tongue? Here's a nice picture of one licking it's eyeball…
http://stalecheerios.com/blog/photos/can-you-touc…
Just found your comic through an ad on SMBC. Am really enjoy reading through the archives of the comic (and the blog)!
cheers,
Mary
I hope you'll make it a regular part of your day!
Keep smiling,
Crow