Our friends at Illustra Media are working on a new film — this one about birds. We can’t wait. In the meantime, Illustra teases us with some stunning footage of a hummingbird feeding. Illustra’s blog aptly comments:
As you experience the awe of how the tiny bird maneuvers at such high speeds, consider by comparison how man was unable to achieve winged flight for many thousands and thousands of years. Not until the turn of the 20th century did we finally (and when measured against what we see in the video, quite clumsily in my opinion) defy gravity using a carefully manufactured giant apparatus. And over 100 years later our best designs today are still crude by comparison. There remains not a single piece of man-made engineering anywhere that rivals the features of design in this tiny seemingly nuclear powered biological life form.
The video brief was taken at 1/10 speed so every 20 seconds of what you see equals just 2 seconds of what you’d see in the wild. Gorgeous.