It's Friday, December 21st, 2018, and you're listening to Up to Date from Inquiring Minds.

I'm And I'm Kishorehari. Any news catcher eye this week?

Yeah. So I first want to play a sound for you and see if you can guess what it is.

So what do you think that is?

I mean, it was like a, almost like a chirp, like except higher pitched, though, I don't know,

maybe like a young bird.

Does it, does it sound sexy to you?

No, sorry.

Well, it does to female hummingbirds.

That's a pretty sexy sound.

That is the sound of a male hummingbird dive bombing at very, very high speeds in a 300

millisecond window, which is essentially the blink of an eye.

So there's this new paper out in nature communications from a group from Princeton.

And they essentially sort of describe this effect, which has been known.

But this is a kind of way of kind of quantifying and figuring out all the details of exactly how these birds do this.

Because it's kind of an amazing feat.

So they're called broad-tailed having birds,

and that's going to be important in a minute.

And what they do is they fly up like 100 feet in the air,

and then they swoop down towards a perched female

and then climb back up for another dive in another direction.

So it's like they're performing an air show for their female.

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