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How Hummingbirds Depend on Humans (In SlowMo) - Smarter Every Day 124

3m read
·Nov 3, 2024

Hey, it's me, Destin. Welcome back to Smarter Every Day. If you're like me, when you think of hummingbirds, you think of cute little animals that go around drinking out of flowers, and everything is happy and beautiful, right? Well, it's not. They're actually savage little beasts that will kill each other to get what they want, which is nectar.

This lady named Ramona called me from Grant, Alabama, and let me know that she has all these beautiful feeders set up in her backyard so she can take photos of hummingbirds any time she wants. It's awesome, but Ramona has thrown the supply and demand curves out of whack. It's a good thing because she's boosting the population, but they now depend on her.

So today on Smarter Every Day, we're gonna do what Ramona wants. We're gonna take the Phantom Miro and get some awesome slow motion of these hummingbirds interacting and fighting around the feeders. And then, see how much of a risk we can make them take, all on slow motion. You're getting Smarter Every Day.

[music]

The way these things work is pretty interesting because they have to have food at all times. It's like a supply on demand kind of need, right? So, hummingbirds defend a territory of about a quarter of an acre. Ramona has artificially boosted the supply in the local area, which means they can peacefully coexist as long as that supply is there, right? But what happens if we start to eliminate the supply?

So think about this ecosystem in terms of economics. You've got a set supply of food and a set demand, the number of birds you have to feed. What happens if we remove the food from the system? We should be able to drive up the price of that food, thereby increasing the amount of risk that the birds want to take in order to get to the food. That's exactly what we're gonna do.

We're gonna manipulate an ecosystem artificially in order to get awesome slow-mo footage. Let's do that right now. Let's get Smarter Every Day. No nutrients here.

[music]

[unintelligible]

[laughs] It works.

[music]

[laughter in background] Shoot, that's crazy!

[laughs] Alright, we're putting feeders back out. There you go.

Well, I hope you enjoyed this episode of Smarter Every Day. This was brought to you by Audible.com. So, if you want to support Smarter Every Day, go check out an audiobook on audible.com/smarter. The one I recommend since we're in Grant, Alabama, which is in Alabama, which is where Harper Lee is from, is called To Kill a Mockingbird.

She wrote one book; that's the only one she published, and she won a Pulitzer Prize for it. That's pretty awesome. Anyway, it's been banned in a lot of places because of the racism and there's some bad words and things like that, but it's a very good book, and it teaches things on multiple levels. So if you want to support Smarter Every Day, audible.com/smarter, To Kill a Mockingbird.

Thank you very much. Please subscribe if we earned it. Appreciate your time, and Ramona, thank you for your hummingbirds. Appreciate the use of your hummingbirds.

(Ramona) Thank you.

(Destin) Thank you so much.

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