How many times per second does a hummingbird beat its wings?
Guess before you scroll — the answer is below
The answer
70 beats per second
Hummingbirds beat their wings around 70 times a second, and their hearts run at over 1,200 beats a minute in flight. To sustain it they eat roughly half their body weight in sugar every day.
How to get close to this number
The sound is the clue. A hummingbird produces an audible hum rather than distinguishable wingbeats, and human hearing begins to perceive a repeated sound as a tone somewhere around twenty cycles a second. A wingbeat that hums has to be well above that, which puts it in the tens per second.
The reason it can sustain that is the heart rate in the explanation: over twelve hundred beats a minute in flight. A muscle working at that frequency needs oxygen delivered at an extraordinary rate, and everything about the animal — heart, breathing, blood — is scaled to support one behaviour.
The feeding consequence is the part that makes the metabolism real: roughly half its body weight in sugar every day. An animal that must eat that much relative to its size is permanently minutes away from starving, which is why hummingbirds enter a torpor state overnight that drops their metabolism close to hibernation levels.
Where this number comes from
| Source | Cornell Lab of Ornithology |
|---|---|
| Figure refers to | 2023 |
| Last checked | |
| Unit | beats per second |
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