Why be interested in birds? If I had to make the case to my 8-year-old self, I might emphasize a simple but easy-to-forget fact: they are fast. Really, really fast.
Some facets of this are visible in astounding numbers, the kinds of records that people love to tabulate and talk about. But the most personally valuable and impactful awareness of the speed of birds is not what we only read about, but what we see with our own eyes. Let’s revisit both.
Start with an easy and familiar case: hummingbirds. In their normal, day-to-day flight, hummingbirds might travel at some 30 mph. (Compare this to humans, who might manage five miles in an hour.) But this is far from their maximum speed. Our own Anna’s hummingbirds, the familiar, year-round hummingbird of California, has been measured reaching 60 mph in their courtship flights. This is happening all around us, if you watch and listen. Male hummingbirds climb effortlessly a hundred feet into the sky, hover for a moment and then throw themselves at the Earth, pulling up at the last moment with a loud “pop!” from their flaring tail feathers. This is the fastest acceleration known for any vertebrate creature.
Birds’ flight abilities are, of course, also amazing over longer distances. Anna’s hummingbirds are year-round residents in California, but in spring and summer we are also visited by Allen’s and rufous hummingbirds. Rufous hummingbirds have a particularly impressive migration, passing through Marin on their way to breeding grounds in Alaska and northwest Canada before returning to Mexico for the winter, a distance of some 4,000 miles. It is not surprising to see this bird, dubbed “the iron-blooded midget” by one colorful longtime bird-writer, chasing the larger Anna’s hummingbirds away from a feeder, when you know that this penny-weight of avian fire is midway through a 4,000-mile migration powered only by insects and flower nectar.
Another group of birds that we think of as fast are raptors. A backyard Cooper’s hawk suddenly bursting out in ambush is fast enough to catch its prey. But they don’t compare with the fastest in the raptor world — the falcons.
Marin sees four falcon species throughout the year, with all four most numerous in winter, which as far as bird migration goes has not yet elapsed: American kestrels, merlins, peregrine falcons, and prairie falcons. Peregrine falcons are the fastest animal in the world, capable of diving at more than 200 mph. We can see them nesting on cliffs at Point Reyes or on tall buildings around the urban Bay Area (check out the Cal Falcons webcam to watch a pair nesting on top of UC Berkeley’s Campanile). In winter you can see them throughout Marin, particularly near bodies of water where they chase shorebirds, ducks, and gulls in addition to a variety of songbird prey.
Hummingbirds and falcons are two of California’s most famous speedsters. But there is a third bird that joins them, one whose speed often gets overlooked: doves. In Miwok stories, falcon and hummingbird challenge dove to a race, without success. “When he and I race, it is a tie,” says hummingbird in one story. Falcon makes the same admission: “We run the same.”
It’s a lesson we should remember, when we see doves trundling innocently around our backyards, looking for seeds. Mourning doves, our small, spotted-winged native species with the famous cooing song, are probably our most familiar doves, and a worthwhile entry in the annals of avian speed, having been measured travelling up to 55 mph, comparable to peregrine falcons in more typical horizontal flight.
But my favorite doves to watch are our second native species, the band-tailed pigeon. These are wild pigeons, the closest living relatives of the extinct passenger pigeons, which used to travel across the continent in great flocks of millions of birds that darkened the sky for days at a time. Band-tails don’t gather in such enormous flocks, but they do still travel in groups, sometimes by the dozen, sometimes in the hundreds. And when the wild pigeons rush overhead with a hundred heavy bodies pulsing through the air, I hear the whistle of wings rise and fall in pitch with the rapidity of their passing, smiling that I get to witness a world that has such speed still in it.
Jack Gedney’s On the Wing runs every other Monday. He is a co-owner of Wild Birds Unlimited in Novato and author of The Private Lives of Public Birds. You can reach him at jack@natureinnovato.com.
