Tag: queue

why-animals-do-the-thing:

neofeliis:

i-peed-so-hard-i-laughed:

continuants:

invisiblespork:

tognir-inainn:

You’re welcome

[Narrator: A scientist in Peru [pause for peep] captured this, escaping from the tiny body [pause for peep] of a sleeping hummingbird. [pause for peep] A high-pitched [pause for peep] but unmistakable snore. [pause for peep] Hummingbirds are loved for their beauty and speed [pause for peep] but this one was behaving a little bit like a human. [pause for peep] The perfect cute-response trigger.]

[pause for peep]

IT PEEP WHEN IT SLEEP!!!!!!!!!!!!

@why-animals-do-the-thing
Do birds snore??

It sounds like they can in terms of physiology, but this isn’t a snore. I’m a little sad that this is actually on BBC because they tend to be more factual than that. 

Audubon responded specifically to this video, saying that noises like this are very abnormal for hummingbirds – especially the open mouth behavior, because they drink nectar and don’t like to let their tongues dry out. There were a number of suggested reasons it was doing this, including extra oxygen to come out of torpor or get warm, but they concluded that it was something else less cute:

What we’re hearing, he thinks, is more likely a sound of stress. Rico-Guevara captures Amethyst-throated Sunangels in mist nests for his research, and recalls juveniles sometimes emitting distress noises oddly similar to this “snore.”

“To me, this is a juvenile calling for help,” says Rico-Guevara. (He knows it’s a young bird thanks to the yellow coloring on the corner of the mouth, which serves as a target for parents to feed their fledglings.) From a purely logical viewpoint, he adds, it makes no sense for a bird to sleepily snore in a predator-packed forest all night—“Snoring is not adaptive!” In people, snoring leads to more broken sleep than it does to anything beneficial.

They do finish with the fact that it’s not all bad – the bird was released after the short amount of research, and flew off just fine. Sometimes stress isn’t great, but it’s unavoidable during research, and as long as the overall welfare of the bird is good it’s okay. However, the whole ‘snoring’ misconception being popularized is irritating.