Not every one of these lives on our lake — but they all belong to the same astonishing family you’ll meet on the water.
1A bar-tailed godwit known as “B6” flew 13,560 km from Alaska to Tasmania without stopping once — 11 days with no food, water or rest. It is the longest non-stop journey ever recorded for any animal.
2The common swift can stay airborne for up to 10 months without landing — feeding, and even sleeping, on the wing.
3The Arctic tern chases summer from pole to pole and back; one tracked bird covered about 96,000 km in a single year.
4Bar-headed geese cross the Himalayas, GPS-tracked above 7,000 m, where the air holds less than half the oxygen we breathe at sea level.
5Many migratory birds carry a quantum compass — light-sensitive proteins in their eyes that may let them literally see Earth’s magnetic field.
6Birds are tetrachromats: they see ultraviolet light we can’t. Feathers, berries and other birds glow with patterns invisible to us.
7An eagle’s eyesight is 4–8 times sharper than ours — it can pick out a hare from up to 3 km away.
8An owl can’t roll its tubular eyes in their sockets, so it swivels its head up to 270° instead.
9The ostrich has the largest eye of any land animal — each eyeball is bigger than its brain.
10A hummingbird’s heart can beat over 1,200 times a minute, and it’s the only bird that can fly backwards.
11Crows and ravens make and use tools, recognise individual human faces for years, and gather around their dead.
12Australia’s lyrebird mimics almost anything it hears — other birds, camera shutters, car alarms, even chainsaws.
13Pigeons can recognise themselves in a mirror, learn letters of the alphabet, and have been trained to spot tumours in medical scans.
14A tiny chickadee hides thousands of seeds each autumn and grows new brain cells to remember where it put them.
15A bird’s voice box, the syrinx, can sing two notes at once — many songs are a single bird harmonising with itself.
16Flamingos aren’t born pink — they turn pink from what they eat, the pigments in algae and tiny shrimp.
17The highest-flying bird on record is a Rüppell’s vulture, struck by an aircraft at about 11,300 m (37,000 ft) — higher than a cruising jet.
18Many birds sleep with half the brain awake and one eye open — some do it in mid-flight, barely landing for weeks.
19Engineers redesigned Japan’s near-silent bullet train after the kingfisher’s beak, which knifes into water almost without a splash.
The long life of an eagle
An eagle’s life is a slow, faithful arc. A pair often mates for life, returning each year to the same eyrie — a stick nest they repair and enlarge until it can weigh as much as a person. The female lays one to three eggs; after roughly 35–45 days the eaglets hatch, helpless and downy. For months the parents hunt almost without rest while the chicks grow fast, flapping at the nest’s edge before they fledge. Even after that first flight, young eagles lean on their parents for weeks as they learn to hunt. They wander for years as mottled brown juveniles, earning their adult plumage — the white head and tail of a bald eagle, say — only at around four or five, when they claim a mate and a territory of their own. In the wild an eagle may live 20 to 30 years, a single bird tracing the same lakes and ridgelines for decades.
From the journalThe rest you can’t scroll toWhy birdwatching by the lake is the relaxation you’ve been missing — an hour from Bengaluru. Read →