By Count Friedrich von Olsen

You can say that today’s column is for the birds, which is my effort to induce the publisher of the Sentinel to bring back his wildlife column, which has been sorely missed all these months while coverage of the Charles Merritt murder trial has been ongoing…
A ruby-throated hummingbird weighs less than 0.2 ounces, if you can believe that. It beats its wings over fifty-two times in one second to hover.  This enables this cute little critter to to suck nectar from flowers…
The rufous hummingbird is a migratory animal, the smallest migrant bird known to man, at only four inches long. Despite its paltry length, on a yearly basis it will make a sojourn of as far as 3,800 miles…
The slowest carinate bird is the American woodcock, which flies along at five miles per hour. For short periods of time, a hummingbird can move at zero miles per hour. In fact, on occasion hummingbirds will fly backwards,  registering a negative speed…
The fastest known speed of a bird in level flight is that of either the spine-tailed swift or the merganser, which is a type of duck, both of which have been clocked at one hundred miles per hour…
This one is hard to believe, but it is claimed that the jet larid is capable of staying aloft for as long as three years without landing. It is nothing for one of these to simply fly across the ocean. Swifts will spend way more of their lives in flight than they will nesting or perched or on the ground. It should go without saying that these types of birds are capable of sleep while they are in the air, doing so by gliding on air currents with their wings extended…
A group of crows is called a murder or congress. A bunch of owls is named a parliament, wisdom, or study. A collection of flamingos is referred to as a flamboyance…
Birds sense winter is coming on through changes in hormones that cause them to add more fat, the change in the length of the day, and by sensing minute changes in atmospheric pressure…
The bald eagle builds the biggest tree nest of all birds, measuring around nine feet across. The biggest nest ever found was nearly ten feet wide and weighed close to three tons. Vervain hummingbirds build the smallest nests of all birds, measure 3/4 of an inch…
Woodcocks and lots of ducks have their eyes placed at the perimeters of their heads such that they possess a 360-degree field of vision. This makes them see all things, either moving or flying around them…
The arrangement of a bird’s blood vessels cools the blood going into its legs and feet and warms the blood coming back in, so that when standing on ice, birds don’t lose an excessive amount of heat from their bodies…
The larger the bird, generally the more years it will live.  The big albatross, for instance, will live for up to eighty years…
Gentoo penguins appear to be the quickest swimming birds, reaching speeds of twenty-two miles per hour. This speed is more than that attained by some land animals. Emperor penguins will remain submerged in incredibly cold water for up to eighteen minutes…