While looking for a new hobby, I decided to try birdwatching and quickly fell in love with it. Since then I have become very passionate about birdwatching and learning more about these beautiful animals.

I created this forum to share the fun facts I learn about birds while reading and browsing the internet.

Birds do not have teeth and while food can be slightly broken down by a beak or bill, most of the crushing occurs in a muscular organ along the digestive tract called a gizzard. Here, powerful muscles squeeze and grind down food. The gizzard is so strong wild turkeys can crush whole walnuts. Sometimes birds will swallow small rocks to provide a hard grinding surface to pulverize food.

Feathers wear out and all birds must replace their feathers periodically in a process called molting. Unlike most birds which molt their large wing feathers gradually and keep their ability to fly, geese and ducks drop all their feathers at once and grow a completely new set. This renders them flightless for about 40 days in the late summer and puts them at risk for attacks from predators.

Seabirds can drink saltwater thanks to a gland situated above their eyes. This salt gland filters water from the blood and excretes it in a highly concentrated solution that drips out of the nostrils.

A six-pound heron can swallow a one-pound fish. That's like a one-hundred pound person swallowing a seventeen-pound fish whole!

A sandpiper's bill is packed with nerve endings so they can sense their prey under the mud or sand, and they have taste buds inside the tip of their bill to test whatever they find.

Owls cannot move their eyes up, down, or side to side, so they have evolved the ability to rotate their heads up to 270 degrees. They have 14 neck bones whereas humans only have 7.

Hummingbirds can fly at an oxygen level equivalent to 43,000 feet elevation. That's 50% higher than Mount Everest.

Birds have the ability to restore damaged hearing by growing new hair cells inside their ear, something humans cannot do.

This is super cool!