birdsoup

I’m still obsessed with the notion that expressing a fact in terms that your audience can relate to makes the facts more meaningful. It is not just an abstract number.

I often point out that birds are truly lightweight, any excess weight would necessitate more energy for flying. So you seldom see a fat bird. A chickadee, for example, only weighs about 0.4 ounces. That sounds pretty lightweight, but who really can sense what 0.4 ounces feel like?

Would you find it easier to relate to that number if, instead of quoting a statistic, I compared the weight of a chickadee to the weight of a McDonald’s quarter pounder? Well, it would take 10 chickadees to equal the weight of one meat pattie.

A hummingbird is even lighter than a chickadee, weighing about 1/8 of an ounce. How light is that? Imagine stuffing 8 hummingbirds into a standard business envelope. You could mail all those hummingbirds to California using just a single 1st Class postage stamp.

Do these illustrations give you a better sense of how lightweight a bird is?