Discover the Fastest Birds in North America

Fastest Eggs to Hatch

Most common backyard birds’ eggs hatch in 11 to 14 days, once the female starts sitting tight on that precious clutch. On occasion, house wren eggs may hatch in only nine days, although 12 days is more typical. Some house wren eggs have taken 16 days to hatch, which is more common with blue jays. You’ll know the moment, however, because the babies begin cheeping. Learn to identify bird eggs by color and size.

Bill Leman Photography

Fastest to Leave the Nest after Hatching

Caring for youngsters usually requires at least 10 days in the nest, and several days after they leave or “fledge.” But some bird babies are up and running around as soon as they break out of the shell. Baby killdeer, quail, grouse, wild turkeys and sandpipers of all sorts are precocious, fuzzy-feathered and able to run as soon as they enter the world. When the clutch hatches, the mother leads the babies off in a group to forage, offering her sheltering wings at naptime. Learn the five stages of a baby bird’s life.

Fastest Flying Birds

Good luck focusing those binoculars on a red-breasted merganser in flight. This large duck easily reaches 70 mph. The golden eagle, with its 6- to 7½-foot wingspan, is right up there, too, sometimes reaching about 80 mph if it’s in a steep glide. Snipes of all sorts, including our North American Wilson’s snipe, are so famously fast and erratic that the word “sniper” was coined for the shooters who could bring down such a difficult target. A snipe’s usual flight speed? About 60 mph. Among backyard birds, the prize goes to the mourning dove, which typically rockets along at about 40 mph, zooming to 55 mph when it goes into high gear to escape a predator. As a comparison, most birds fly at about 25 mph.

Fastest Running Bird on Foot

In North America, our speediest land bird is the greater roadrunner. Its usual pace is 20 mph, and it can reach about 26 mph in top gear. Still, it’s a slowpoke compared to the ostrich, which can sprint at 50 mph.

Courtesy Matthew Bolyard

Fastest Birds to Hand-Tame

A handful of nuts makes a great bribe to coax birds into eating out of your hand. Bold, curious chickadees are usually the fastest to check out the new “feeder,” followed by their titmice cousins. Nuthatches, especially the tiny red-breasted, are also relatively easy to hand-tame. Try the trick with winter finches, too—pine siskins, redpolls, crossbills and grosbeaks from the North, which are often less wary of humans than other feeder visitors.

Fastest Metabolism

We’d have to chomp 300 cheeseburgers a day to keep up with the eating habits of hummingbirds, if our body worked as fast as theirs. The metabolism of a hummingbird is faster than that of almost every other animal on earth; only the body of the tiny shrew works faster. In flight, a hummer’s heart rate is around 1,000 beats a minute. Its digestion is 70 times faster than ours. This warp-speed metabolism slows down when a hummer isn’t flying. That’s why, although you might not guess from the constant buzz at your feeder, hummingbirds spend most of their waking hours perched and resting. Check out 13 jaw-dropping facts about hummingbirds.

Fastest Wingbeat

Hummingbirds win this one, hands down. The smaller the hummingbird, the faster its wings beat. The ruby-throated hummingbird beats about 50 times a second. The giant hummingbird of the Andes, about the same length as a cardinal, hums at 12 beats a second. The bee hummingbird of Cuba, the smallest bird on earth at only 2 inches from bill tip to tail tip, buzzes along at 80 beats per second.