
With more than 2.7 million views, you may already know about the snoring hummingbird video, footage that resulted from a scientific study measuring hummingbird oxygen consumption.
Now, for the debunking: This Amethyst-throated Sunangel is not exactly sleeping and its certainly not snoring. Hummingbirds dont snore, says , a hummingbird researcher from the University of Connecticut. This is not natural for a resting behavior.
Something about the bird is indeed off. The open mouth and exposed tongue are strange, says Rico-Guevara, who how hummingbirds drink nectar in 2011. They dont like their tongues drying out.
The videos publisher, who was studying for a masters degree in ornithology upon publishing the video three years ago, that the hummingbirds mouth is open because it is taking in extra oxygen to come out of a short, nightly hibernation in which birds lower their breathing rate and body temperature to conserve energy on cool evenings.
But Rico-Guevara has seen hummingbirds in torpor, and he says that while they may to get warm, they never make noises like this.
What were 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 its 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 nightSnoring is not adaptive! In people, leads to more broken sleep than it does to anything beneficial.
The good news is that even if the bird wasn't snoring, this little one made out all right. After the experiment was done, I watched the bird fly away myself, it was fine, the videos author . The welfare of birds means the world to me, and I am dedicating my career to their conservation.