How Birds Fly

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Birds have beautiful feathers and lovely songs that bring joy and wonder to us humans. And flight is the feature that probably captures the human imagination more than anything else. For millennia, people have watched birds in the sky and wished we could fly, too. There are almost as many ways of flying as there are kinds of birds. Albatrosses glide and soar with long narrow wings stretched out, sometimes staying aloft for hours without a single wing beat. Hummingbirds, on the other hand, can't rest their wings for even a second in flight. Woodpeckers have a swooping flight, crows fly in a straight line, and swallows dart and weave every which way. The Gravity of the Situation. Isaac Newton is the scientist who first realized that gravity is a force between two objects that draws them toward each other. The more mass an object has, the more it pulls other things toward it. The largest object anywhere on earth is the planet itself, so gravity pulls everything down toward the center of the earth. Gravity pulls on birds, too. In order to minimize the effects of gravity, birds are adapted to be as light as possible. These are some adaptations that help make birds light: Hollow bones Feathers Babies don't grow and develop inside the mothers' bodies. They develop in eggs outside their mothers' bodies. Birds eat foods that are very high in usable calories so they get as many calories as possible from from a small amount of food. Seeds, fruits, and meat (from prey) are the main food items for birds. Virtually no birds (except the Hoatzin, which lives in South America) eat leaves, which take a long time to digest. Their efficient digestion allows birds to get rid of useless weight very quickly. Birds don't have bladders. A bird urinates as soon as it has to, getting rid of the useless weight. (That's why you can't housebreak even the smartest pet bird.) Birds

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