Avian world

1.How many toes do birds have?
2.Which bird has the largest wings?
3.How do birds land?
4.Which bird spends its whole life in the summer?
5.Which birds build the biggest nests?
6.What is bird's nest soup?
7.When do eggs get noisy?
8.Which bird eats only snails?
9.Which birds make weird music with their feathers?
10.Why do birds throw away their eggshells?

[Answers]

1.Two, three or four. A typical perching bird has three toes pointing forward and one pointing back. Birds that run on hard ground have only three and all of them point forward. Ostriches have two toes that are shaped like the hoof of an antelope. Woodpeckers have two toes pointing forward and two back. Owls can turn their fourth toe either forward or backwards, for perching on a branch or to get a better grip on prey. Swifts have four toes and they all point forward.

2.The wandering albatross. Its wingspan (the distance from one wingtip to the other when the wings are stretched out) is more than three metres. The largest ever measured was a male with a wingspan of 3.45 (5 feet).

3. Ideally, by stalling, that is ceasing to move forward, just as they touch down. Large water birds like swans can water-ski to a halt on outstretched feet. Boobies and albatrosses which spend most of the year at sea, often crash and tumble over when they finally return to land to breed.

4.The Arctic Tern breeds in the Arctic, to within 720km (430 miles) of the North Pole and migrates every year to the Antarctic, a total distance of 38,400 km (23,000 miles) between breeding seasons. It spends its whole life in the summer because of it.

5. Eagles. A bald eagle's nest is very big. A nest used for over 35 years discovered in Ohio, USA had measured eight feet across and 12 feet deep. It had weighed 1.8 tonnes. Another in Florida had been even bigger – nearly 10 feet wide and more than 20 feet deep.

6. A far Eastern delicacy, a soup or jelly made from the sticky cement that cave swiftlets use to stick twigs and feathers together to make their nests. Some species use only their saliva for this, produced from glands in their mouth; their cement is said to be the best for making soup.

7.Chicks of hidifugus birds make clicking sounds in the last few days before they hatch.

8.The Everglade Kite, in Florida. It is a genuine bird of prey with strong talons and a sharply hooked beak, but its only food is snails.

9. Snipe birds. They have special feathers in their tails that make a ‘drumming’ or ‘bleating’ sound when they dive quickly during their display flights. Mute swans also make a high pitched creaking sound with their wings as they fly.

10. Because the white inside of the shell would attract predators. Most ground-nesting birds carry their eggshells quite a distance from the nest before dropping them. This was proved in a famous experiment with gulls by the great ornithologist, Niko Tinbergen.