Category: Birds
These masters of graceful flight can soar hundreds of miles a day, barely flapping their wings as they scan the ocean waters for prime fishing. They feed by sitting on the water surface and catching squid and other small prey with their bills. They are named for the Laysan breeding colony in the Hawaiian Islands, where they are the second most common seabird. Laysan albatrosses can be exceptionally long-lived - one individual was still nesting at 63 years of age, as of 2014.
Asleep at the wheel?
Can you imagine spending nearly all of your life in the air? The common swift doesn’t have to - it just does! From the day this bird learns to fly, it almost never touches the ground voluntarily - it eats, drinks, mates, and may even sleep while flying. While sleep walking can be problematic in humans, many birds have the ability to enter a state called unihemispheric slow-wave sleep, where one half of the brain sleeps as the other remains alert. This method of “sleeping with one eye open,” is a great way to avoid becoming another animal’s meal, and has led to the suspicion that these birds, who almost never willingly land, also sleep while in flight!
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