Uploaded September 2012 | Updated September 2026, 1 day ago

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An Anna's hummingbird hovers in a wind tunnel and sips sucrose from a syringe. When researchers turned on the air, the bird had to push backwards in order to reach its snack, as seen in the video. Here, it's actually flying backward at an airspeed of 3 m s−1; the video is slowed motion by a factor of 50.

Read the full story at: discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/watch-this-hummingbirds-fly-forwards-and-backwards-with-equal-ease

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Credit: Nir Sapir & Robert Dudley. 2012. Backward flight in hummingbirds employs unique kinematic adjustments and entails low metabolic cost. Journal of Experimental Biology. 215:3603-3611. doi: 10.1242/jeb.073114

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