Maine’s Bird Olympics are upon us, and it is time to award the gold medals.
The gold for fastest bird goes to our peregrine falcon, the swiftest of all animals. In a stoop, it can hit speeds over 200 mph. The fastest dive on record was 242 mph. Surprisingly, red-breasted mergansers are among the fastest flying birds in level flight. They can reach 139 mph. Other ducks are nearly as fast.
I guess you have to be fast if there’s a falcon in the neighborhood.
The gold for highest flying bird goes to the Ruppell’s griffon vulture — a bird of central Africa that is so remote from Maine that I had never heard of it until I looked it up. It was documented flying at 37,000 feet when it collided with an airliner. I had presumed that bald eagles fly the highest in Maine, but I was mistaken. If you can believe it, mallards have been known to reach 21,000 feet, though they normally tend to stay under 5,000. Eagles seldom go higher than 15,000 feet. I suppose they don’t have to.
Often, mountain ranges determine how high birds can fly. Migrating birds need to get over the Rockies, Alps, Himalayas, etc.
Our bald eagle does win the gold for largest nest, at least among tree nesters. Some Australian birds build mounds on the ground that weigh hundreds of tons. Some colonial nesting birds in Africa build huge nests that accommodate many birds at once. But no bird can compete with the eagle when it comes to stick nests in trees. Eagles use the same nest every year, adding new sticks each season. Old nests can be larger than 10 feet around and weigh up to 2 tons. Sooner or later, that becomes more weight than the tree can hold, especially in an icy winter, but a good nest can last decades.
For deepest diving bird, the gold goes to the thick-billed murre, at least among birds that can fly. It can reach depths of nearly 700 feet, grab prey and return to the surface in less than three minutes. It is so good at diving, it swallows its prey underwater in order to minimize time at the surface. I confess, the thick-billed murre is barely a Maine bird. It does not breed here, preferring to nest in colonies off the coast of Newfoundland, but it does wander into Maine waters in winter.
In the flightless competition, the emperor penguin of Antarctica can dive deeper and stay down longer than the thick-billed murre, but there is a remarkable evolutionary convergence in these two unrelated species. Flight feathers are an inefficient encumbrance for diving birds and the prehistoric birds that became penguins gave up flying altogether. Members of the alcid family have also evolved to become better divers. This family includes puffins, razorbills, dovekies, guillemots and murres. All have extremely short wings, inefficient for flying but excellent for diving. The thick-billed murre’s wings are so stubby that it can barely fly. Its extinct cousin, the great auk, was completely flightless like modern penguins.
The gold for longest song goes to Maine’s winter wren. These wrens sing the longest song in North America, and we’ve got a lot of them in our woods. They may raise multiple broods in a season. After a period of silence in early July, I was amused to hear a chorus of wren songs around the state in midsummer as males got ready to be daddies again.
The gold for longest migration goes to the arctic tern. We have several nesting islands along the Maine coast. When they leave here, they head for the Antarctic. However, they don’t fly there directly. They can meander from Maine to Europe and Africa, then back to South America, and so on. Arctic terns that nest in Iceland and Greenland average 44,000 miles during their annual round trip. Some terns in the Netherlands may exceed 56,000 miles in one year.
The competition for smartest bird is too close to call, but the gold medal winner will likely be a member of the corvid family, which includes crows, ravens, jays and magpies. Crows have demonstrated more intelligence than apes, dolphins and Congress. They can make and customize tools. They can rationalize cause and effect, working out solutions to puzzles if the there is a morsel of food to reward them. They can count. They can remember human faces. If I were totally honest, that’s more than I can do on some days.
Bob Duchesne serves as vice president of Maine Audubon’s Penobscot Valley Chapter. He developed the Maine Birding Trail, with information at mainebirdingtrail.com. He can be reached at duchesne@midmaine.com.