Video: Hummingbirds perform fastest-ever body shakes

The record-breaking Anna’s hummingbird (Image: Andreas Peña Doll, Rivers Ingersoll, David Lentink, Stanford University, California)

Not content with being the fastest mover on the planet, the Anna’s hummingbird is also the fastest shaker.

An ultra-slow-mo camera that can shoot at up to 650,000 frames per second has caught the birds performing a micro-shimmy that is 10 times faster than a dog shakes after a bath.

Andreas Peña Doll and Rivers Ingersoll, both students in David Lentink‘s lab at Stanford University, California, filmed Anna’s hummingbirds (Calypte anna) performing the body shakes in flight. The birds’ tiny bodies shook 55 times each second.


“It’s the fastest shake of any vertebrate on the planet,” says Lentink.

The achievement adds to a growing list of speed records set by Anna’s hummingbirds. During courtship, males fly nearly 400 times the length of their body each second, making them the fastest moving vertebrates, relative to their body size, in the world. The hummingbirds use that speed to make their tail feathers vibrate like the reed of a wind instrument and produce chirps far louder than their vocalisations.

Do the dry weather shake

Peña Doll suggests that the shakes – performed in dry weather – may help remove pollen or dirt from the feathers in the same way a wet shake removes water.

Robert Dudley at the University of California at Berkeley had previously filmed wet hummingbirds in the lab and saw them do a body shake to dry off in the rain, but the dry weather shakes had never been seen before.

“The video shows the universality of this shaking ability, across animals that walk and even fly,” says David Hu at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, who has studied body shakes in a wide range of animals, from mice to bears.

Lentink builds robots inspired by animal behaviour, and says the hummingbird shimmy could add to his bots’ repertoire.

Peña Doll’s study will be published in the Journal for Biomechanics of Flight, an in-house peer-reviewed journal run by Lentink’s students.