From our friends at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology: a student-made film, shot earlier this spring in Southern California, which reveals what some birds and insects can do in the blink of an eye.
The short (1:40) video was filmed using a a Sony FS700 camera, which records 240 frames per second. When it is played back at normal speed (24-30 fps) one second is stretched into eight seconds.
Writing in the Cornell Lab's blog Round Robin, student Shailee Shah describes the result:
Our human sensory organs are by no means perfect. There are colors we cannot see, sounds we cannot hear, textures we cannot feel, speeds we cannot process. Technology like high-speed videography can help make these phenomena accessible to our sensory range and uncover the secrets of this hidden world, an opportunity that we were very fortunate to have as students on this expedition.
Of course the footage of hummingbirds feeding and landing are pretty amazing; what really surprises are the invisible behaviors of less-specacular creatures such as avocets and other shorebirds. The clip of a snowy egret spearing a springtail, while not exactly
I particularly enjoyed Shailee's description of a flying beetle:
... driving through the Carrizo Plain—a vast, arid grassland east of San Luis Obispo—looking for pronghorns and Prairie Falcons, we noticed a host of scarab beetles flying about. So we got down on our hands and knees and filmed one taking off from a rock. A quiver of antennae, a sudden unfolding of wings and it was gone, launching itself in the air in a split second. Played back in slow motion, the elegance of the beetle’s flight is revealed as its metallic orange wings fold out, like an entomological Transformer, and it seems to hover its way into the air.
Related articles:
In Bird Census, Signs of Warming
Peregrine Falcon Chicks Hatch
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