Sorry for the vertical video there. I was recording for the Instagram story

So I caught this bird with my hand and I got to thinking about it

It's kind of a shame to have a bird and let it go and not film it in slow motion

So, that's what we're gonna do. Alright, this is my daughter's

butterfly

Thing. Where you at little bird?

Hey

calm down buddy

Calm down, calm down

There you go calm down

Okay, let's hold you where you don't get hurt

There you go. All right. Let's go let you go. What do you think? So

I've always been fascinated by birds their wings in particular. You see that the primary feathers one, two, three, four, five six, seven, eight

Nine, I thought they had ten primary feathers. Maybe they do and then these are the secondary feathers

And then the feathers around his eyes

It's really cool. He's scared so we're gonna try to try to get him out of here real quick

He's wanting to fly away. I know this isn't like a super in-depth smartereveryday video

But this is just a target of opportunity something to learn really quick

What I want to know is when he takes off

if his tail feathers are correctin' immediately or it has to wait until he's moving in flight before he starts using those. We probably

Won't see that because we literally have one shot to do this

But I'm really excited. Did you see his eyes like the little

Feathery things around his eyes. I've never noticed that anyway, he's getting tired. We got to let him go

Alright here we go. Releasing the bird

Three, two, one

That was fast. All right, let's look at it. I mean we we've probably just got the launch but I like birds

All right, I set out to make a cute little video of a bird hopping out of my hand

But I actually learned a ton from this footage. Number one

It's clear that the bird hops out of my hand, and I've never thought about that

I'm sure that's just common knowledge to ornithologists, but for some reason I always thought birds just start flapping to fly

And he's hopping why would they not use their legs to get further away from the ground?

So their wings don't hit the ground or my hand or whatever. That's just cool. I've never thought about that number two

I think it's neat that he points his tail towards the ground on that hop

And I've got to believe he's doing that to reduce the vertical component of drag so that he can hop farther

Another thing that happens is on the downstroke. You can see that his feathers are together

But his feathers delaminate to reduce drag on the backstroke, we've seen that in a smartereveryday episode in the past

It's fun to see it again here number four. It's cool to see him transition that tail from being pointed down. He raises it

So he's getting ready for horizontal flight so that transition from vertical flight to horizontal flight

He straightens his tail out to get it in the game. He's getting ready to make corrections in horizontal flight

I think it's really cool to make your own observations because all this probably exists in a scientific paper somewhere

But it's fun to actually see it for yourself and try to understand. I'm gonna be looking for these things

Every time I see a bird take off from now on. Alright, that's enough of this bird. You want to see my garden?

These are my sunflowers. I

grow them for

All the ladies in my life

My daughter my mom

my wife

While we're here, you want to see my corns-es?

My corns-es are bad. I think I overwatered them. These are my corn-es

These are my corns-es and

Right here look at this bad boy. Look at it.

Beautiful

It's a good-looking melon right there

anyway

It's a simple video. I hope you enjoyed it. I'm Destin. You're getting smarter every day. Have a good one. Bye