birdsoup

In my recent post about Bald Eagles with ironing board wings I mentioned that now I realize that a plain fact probably isn’t very interesting. In order for a fact to “strike a chord” with a person it has to relate to something that person is familiar with. A mere fact, or number, is just, that a number. It may have no meaning.

Personally I am often fascinated with unusual facts about birds, you might call it bird trivia, how big they are, how small, how much they eat, etc. Now I understand that, in order to make these facts fascinating to others, I have to present each fact in more relatable way.

Consider the well-known fact that the Peregrine falcon is the fastest creature on earth having been timed at over 200 miles per hour. That sound pretty fast. But how fast is it really?
Here is my first attempt to put that common factoid into a more meaningful context:

The typical city block is about 1/10 of a mile long. A peregrine flying at 200 mph would travel the complete block in less than two seconds. To me, when I define a Peregrine’s speed in that way, it sounds really fast.

Or here is another way to put the speed in perspective. A cheetah is the fastest land animal reaching speeds of 60 miles per hour. A very fast human sprinter may go about 20 miles per hour. Lets say at the next Olympics they decide to hold a 100-meter dash with a Peregrine, a Cheetah, and the world’s fastest man competing.

At the sound of the starter’s gun all three competitors take off at top speed. When the Peregrine crosses the finish line a hundred meters away, the Cheetah will only have traveled about 1/3 of the way to the finish line. And the human would be barely out of the starting blocks having traveled only about 10-meters.

Yep, I think both of these exampless make the Peregrine seem very fast.