The Power of Insects

Insects have much more power than to just give you a scare. Many of them do enormous damage to vegetation. A few examples:

• Silk worms may not be that silky, but they’re silky-smooth eaters. In 56 days, a single silk worm eats 86,000 times its weight at the time of hatching.
• Some mesh-eating larvae can eat 200 times their own weight in just one day.
• Pair of chinch bugs is more powerful than the thermo-nuclear bombs of all countries put together! The human race may survive the nuclear bomb, but if chinch bugs reproduce in ideal conditions, there’ll be no place left for humans to inhabit the earth!

What are Birds?

Birds are vertebrate, warm-blooded, feathered bipeds. Birds are also nature’s finest custom-designed way to check the growth of insects. Their primary mode of locomotion is flight. You need more energy to run than to walk. Aeroplanes require more fuel to fly than cars require to run. Similarly, birds require a lot of energy to fly. They get this from insects (their very own protein bars) most of the times. Most birds are insectivores. They not only eat insects but the larvae and eggs as well. One mamma and papa starling pair bring food like caterpillars and grasshoppers to their nestlings 370 times a day. Imagine if your mamma was nagging you to eat not three times, but 370 times daily. One mamma and papa house sparrow bring food to their nestling 260 times a day. One mamma, papa and their chick tits, as observed and estimated by an ornithologist in Germany, destroy 120 million insect eggs per year.

Do you know these superpowers of birds?

Like bees, birds pollinate flowers and also disperse seeds. Dodos-before it was ‘dead as a dodo’, or extinct-used to eat the fruits of a native tree found on the island where it lived. The fruit had a very hard shell, but the dodo’s strong gizzard could dissolve it. The seeds passed with its poop, got dispersed and sprouted. This was how the plant thrived in its habitat. However, once the dodo was dead due to hunting by humans, this tree also vanished from the island as its seeds were no longer dispersed.

An owl hunts two to three mice per night. Does it hunt mice because it’s wise? Or is it wise because it hunts mice? In any case, mice are among the most widespread vermin that live among humans.

Vultures clean the environment by eating dead animals. If the corpses are left to rot in cities, villages and jungles, it would not only spread a foul smell but also many diseases.

All those superheroes you love reading about or watching, who know how to fly, have learnt it from the birds. Who else knows how to fly? But seriously, the earliest inventors of airplanes took many a leaf-or feather-from the birds’ book of flying. They observed flight patterns and methods of taking off and landing and tried to replicate these in the aircraft they were creating.

After World War II, when air travel became more widespread, engineers created wide-bodied airplanes. But how could they land these heavy planes on short runways? They thought of heavy-bodied vultures. Vultures land their large bodies on a small space and take off in a few steps! Since they couldn’t study the difficult to spot superheroes (always pretending to be average in the day time), they studied the landing and take-off patterns of vultures instead.

By studying how the vultures tilt their primaries-the long flight feathers along the outer edge of the wing connected to the bird’s ‘hand’-they built heavy-bodied planes successfully. The primaries provide thrust in a bird’s flight. They can be individually rotated as well to control direction, air resistance and lift. The wings of the aircraft were crafted in a similar manner to control and provide a stable flight.

Going… Going… Not yet gone

Sadly bird numbers are declining rapidly worldwide. Around 97 per cent of vultures vanished from India in a decade. Their decline started in the 1990s due to the use of a drug called diclofenac given to livestock. It proved to be fatal for the vultures that ate these diclofenac containing dead animals.

Other birds are dying due to the destruction of their living quarters, the cutting of trees where they build their nests. There is a lot of commercial fishing in lakes and ponds and fish-eating birds like cormorants and pelicans, which solely rely on fish, are dying. Insecticides are killing the insects in the fields and not enough is left for the birds to eat.

In fact, a lot of birds die of poisoning from eating insects that have been killed using insecticides. Fruits and berries are harvested widely for human consumption leaving very little for fruit-eating birds. They say birds would be happy without humans on earth. But we wouldn’t be much happier without birds. Who’s going to sing songs in the morning or dance when it rains and eat all those creepy crawlies and the dead rotten mice? Not us for sure!

So why don’t you step outside with your teacher or parentsand try to identify at least five different birds? Who knows, you might be able to spot a butcher bird too. If you’re lucky, it may even treat you with its mimicry. The butcher is a great mimic as well. Since it barely knows you, it may not mimic you.

But if you give it a patient ear, you may hear it mimic the parrot or the rooster or even a dramatic cry of pain of a squirrel being carried away by a hawk-all to impress the female. This bird is certainly a most colourful character-not only does it have an interesting manner of hunting and consuming its prey, it also confuses everyone around by sounding like many other creatures. Wouldn’t it be a shame if the shrikes were to vanish one day?

BOLD BIRD FACTS!

Which is the most common bird on the planet? Chicken!

Hummingbirds can fly backwards and beat their wings as fast as 80 times per second!

A turkey vulture defends itself by vomiting its foul-smelling, semi-digest d meal!

The smallest bird in the world is the bee hummingbird of Cuba!

The elephant bird, which became extinct in the 17th century, was at that time the largest bird in the world, reaching more than 10 feet in height!