The peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus) is the fastest living creature, reaching speeds of at least 124 mph and possibly as much as 168 mph when swooping from great heights during territorial displays or while catching pry birds in midair.
Fastest Wing beat
The horned sungem (Heliactin cornuta), a hummingbird from South America, beats its wings up and down 90 times a second.
Flying Backwards
While hummingbirds are probably the champions of backwards flight they are by no means the only birds that can fly in this way. When two herons or egrets fight, periodically one of them caught at a disadvantage in the dispute will flutter backward. Occasionally warblers fluttering at the tip of a branch as they pick off insects will flutter backward when they overshoot some flying insect. It is probable that any bird which uses fluttering flight can move backward when pressed to do so.
Fastest Land Bird
Despite its bulk, the ostrich can run at speeds of up to 45 mph if necessary.
Highest-Flying Birds
A Ruppells vulture (gyps rueppellii) collided with a commercial aircraft over Abidjan, Ivory Coast, at an altitude of 37,000 feet in November 1973. The impact damaged one of the aircrafts engines, but the plane landed safely. The species is rarely seen above 20,000 feet.
In 1967, about 30 whooper swans (Cygnus were spotted at an altitude of just over 27,000 feet by an airline pilot over the Western Isles, UK. They were flying from Iceland to Loch Foyle on the Northern Ireland/republic Ireland border. Their altitude was confirmed by air traffic control.
Longest Stride
The stride of an ostrich may exceed 23 feet in length when the bird is sprinting.
Highest G-Force Borne
The beak of the red-headed woodpecker (Melanerpes erythrocephalus) hits the bark of a tree with an impact of velocity of 13 mph, subjection the birds brain to a deceleration of approximately 10 g when its head snaps back. Other woodpeckers may experience and even higher g-force.
Most Food Consumed
Hummingbirds (family Trochilidon) requires at least half their own body weight in food (mainly nectar and tiny insects) every single day. With the possible exception of shrews, they have the highest metabolic rate of any known animal. Strangest Diet
An ostrich living at the London Zoo, England was found to have swallowed an alarm clock, a roll of film, a handkerchief, a 3-foot long piece of rope, a cycle valve , a pencil, three gloves, a collar stud, a Belgian franc, four halfpennies and two farthings.
Longest Fast
The male emperor penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri) spends several months without feeding on the frozen wastes of the Antarctic sea ice. It travels overland from the sea to the breeding colony, courts the female, incubates the egg for 62-67 days, waits for the female to return and travels back to the open sea, going without food for up to 134 days. Largest Prey
The wild animal known to have been killed and carried away by a bird was a 15 pound male red howler monkey killed by a harpy eagle (Harpia harpyja) in Manu National Park, Peru in 1990. The harpy eagle is considered the worlds most powerful bird of prey, although it weighs only 20 pounds.
An incredible video of a Golden Eagle taking a small Mountain sheep or goat and carrying it off to its nest. www.youtube.com/watch?v=4irYqe5yjcE
The largest documented prey taken by a Philippine eagle is a 14 kg (30.8 lbs) Philippine deer Cervus at a nest studied by Kennedy in 1985. also on records; a mature female monkey taken and carrying it in one foot in Cagayan; and a large python.
The African crowned eagle is Africas most powerful and ferocious eagle in terms of the weight and nature of prey taken. Mammalian prey, especially duikers, may weigh up to 34 kg (75 lbs) and still be preyed on by these eagles.
Sharpest Vision
The peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus) is believed to be able to spot a pigeon from a distance of more than 5 miles under ideal conditions.
Biggest Nest
The incubation mounds built by the mallee fowl (Leipoa ocellata) of Australia are up to 15 feet tall and 35 feet wide. A nest site is estimated to weigh 330 tons.
A 9 ft. 6 in. Wide 20 foot deep nest was built by a pair of bald eagles ( Haliaeetus leucocephalus), and possibly by their successors, close to St Petersburg, Florida. When examined in 1963, the nest was estimated to weigh in excess of 2.2 tons.
Smallest Nests
The vervian hummingbird ( Mellisuga minima) builds a nest about half the size of a walnut shell. The deeper but narrower nest of the bee hummingbird (M. Helenae) is thimble sized.
Smallest Egg
The smallest known birds egg were tow vervain hummingbird (Mellisuga minima) eggs less than 39/100 inch long. They weighed 0.365 g. (0.0128 oz.) And 0.375 g (0.0132 oz.)
Biggest Eggs (contribution by Christoph Kulmann)
The extinct giant elephant bird (Aephornis maximus) - picture below under heaviest birds - laid 1 foot long eggs with a lElephant Bird egg compared to chicken eggliquid capacity of 2.25 gallons- the equivalent of seven ostrich eggs and more than 12,000 humming bird eggs. When early Arabian and Indian explorers started returning from their journeys along the coast of Africa with stories of gigantic birds many times the size of a man, they brought evidencehuge eggs, up to three feet in circumference. They were the eggs of a bird that would later come to be known as the Elephant Bird, or Vouron Patra (Aepyornis maximus). The eggs that the Elephant Bird laid were larger than the largest dinosaur eggs, and, in fact, they were as large as a structurally functional egg could possibly bethe largest single cells to have ever existed on Earth.
The ostrich egg is 6-8 inches long. 4-6 inches in diameter and weighs 2 lb. 3 oz. - 3 lb.14 oz.. It is equal in volume to 24 chicken eggs. The shell is 3/50 inch thick but can support eh weight of an adult human. The largest on record was laid in 1988 by a two year old northern/southern hybrid (Struthio c. camelus x s. c. australis) at the Kibbutz Haon collective farm, Israel. Ti weighted 5 lb. 2 oz.
Fastest Land Bird
