birdsoup

In a continuing effort to supply you with bird facts in a meaningful way, try these:

1. An Ostrich egg, weighing about 3 pounds, is the largest egg. We all know about how heavy 3 pounds is. But maybe a better way to depict the size of an Ostrich egg, is to describe what you can do with it. There is enough matrial in a single Ostrich egg to cook the equivalent of 24 fried (chicken) egg sandwiches. That is 2 dozen chicken eggs.

2. Birds usually fly at an altitude of less than 100 feet. During migration, however, they fly higher often as high as several thousand feet. The altitude record is held by the Bar-headed Goose, an Asian species which annually migrates over the Himalayas including Mount Everest, the highest place on earth (elevation: over 5 miles).

3. The bird that undergoes the longest migration is the Arctic Tern which annually travels over 24,000 miles round trip, from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back. By the time the tern is 10 years old, it could have flown to the moon.