Imagine you had a never-ending hunger that compelled you to eat more than your weight in sugar every day. And imagine you had to find that food in a near-continuous windstorm.

Now you know how a hummingbird feels.

A new study from researchers at RMIT University in Australia and Harvard tries to explain just how the supercharged sprites do what they do every day, especially in rough weather.

You've seen the slow motion footage. At 1,000 frames a second, a hummingbird's wings swoop in graceful figure-eights, keeping its tiny body aloft and sliver straw beak steady as it sucks a mid-flight meal. The air is still, and everything around it is calm.

Too easy, thought Sridhar Ravi.

Song, J. et al/Royal Society Interface

Ravi, lead author on the new study, wanted to see how hummingbirds coped with real world conditions. When asked how often hummingbirds might fly in less than calm skies, he said by email, "that's like asking, how often do walking animals encounter uneven terrain?" "The answer is basically all the time and they need to come up with strategies to contend with the unsteadiness of the medium," he said.

The earth's surface is "messy" as he puts it, and turbulence-makers like vegetation, buildings and topography tend to make a hummingbird's life rough.

Hummingbirds are nearly unmatched in the air

But it's also hard to catch a hummingbird on film during a wind storm, so Ravi and colleagues manufactured one. And four female ruby-throated hummingbirds went into their wind tunnel.

They placed markers on the birds' bodies, so that all parts of the animal could be tracked with almost maddening accuracy, and then let them fly toward a sugar feeder at the end of the tunnel. They pumped up the wind, which rushed through a grid first to add all the chaotic turbulence of a real-world gusts.

What they found was proof hummingbirds are nearly unmatched in the air.

Every bird's head remained remarkably stable in the face of up to a 10 mile-per-hour wind, which Ravi said created a "turbulence intensity" of 15%. (Just for comparison, the researchers had experienced pilots try to fly mini-drones in the same tunnel with just 5% turbulence intensity. Not one could keep their craft in the air — much less sucking out of a nectar tube.)

How remarkable is their stability ability? Ravi suggested it's like "asking a person to maintain perfect handwriting in a car as it is being driven off-road." What if that person happened to be a hostage? And what if they were writing a ransom letter that had to be flawless to ensure their release? The hummingbird would write that letter perfectly, straying no farther than the width of the tip of the pen they were using to write with, no matter the bumps and jumps. And this is all while the rest of the bird's body, and particularly its tail, is moving like mad to compensate. "The birds can rotate the tail along all axes and can fan it as well," Ravi said.

But that's not all. "Also note that the birds are experiencing accelerations up to 1G, implying the person must perform the task in the off-road car while instantaneously experiencing forces equivalent to their own weight!"

Their wings are just too complicated for us to mimic

Try that sometime.

What Ravi and colleagues still don't understand is how they do it. It is yet unclear how the hummingbird's brain, which is 2.5 times bigger in size compared with those of chickens or turkeys, controls the rest of the animal with such precision and speed in turbulence.

But his team is looking in future research at how hummingbirds "recruit" their muscles to fight high winds.

As for any hope of us making next generation aircraft — manned or not — based on the hummingbird model, Ravi said that their wings are just too complicated for us to mimic. But a future with drones who carry the tail of a hummingbird might not be too far off.

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