Make no mistake, there are birds who have mustered the art of flying – stealth, speed, endurance, all rolled into one – perfected to the minutest of details. In fact, to say they have mustered this is to put it incorrectly – they were built this way. Born to fly the high skies.New Sniper Rifle
A lot of birds are capable of doing very long distances or very fast speeds, but finding one that can do both is quite rare. Take the peregrine falcon, for instance. Hitting unbelievable speeds of 200mph (322kph), they are possibly the fastest of birds on the globe. The Arctic tern, on the other hand, can fly the furthest distance during its migration. Can you try put a figure to the distance it covers? It goes from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back again, making brief stops for refueling. By the time it’s done, it will have clocked a whopping 50,000 miles (80,500km). Believe it or rot.
Enter the Great snipe. This, this is another wonder. It combines both speed and distance attributes and based on monitoring geolocators used by a group of Swedish scientists on 10 male Great snipes, one bird covered the distance between Sweden and central Africa in 3.5 days! That’s 4225 miles (6800km). But wait. Another covered a distance of 3833 miles (6169km) in 3 days, while another made 2870 miles (4619km) in 2 days.
It’s not a wonder then that British soldiers from the late eighteenth century and through the nineteenth century used to gauge their marksmanship by hunting the snipe. Shoot down one, and you had passed the ultimate test. Btw, this was the origin of the name ‘sniper’.
A lot of birds are capable of doing very long distances or very fast speeds, but finding one that can do both is quite rare. Take the peregrine falcon, for instance. Hitting unbelievable speeds of 200mph (322kph), they are possibly the fastest of birds on the globe. The Arctic tern, on the other hand, can fly the furthest distance during its migration. Can you try put a figure to the distance it covers? It goes from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back again, making brief stops for refueling. By the time it’s done, it will have clocked a whopping 50,000 miles (80,500km). Believe it or rot.
Enter the Great snipe. This, this is another wonder. It combines both speed and distance attributes and based on monitoring geolocators used by a group of Swedish scientists on 10 male Great snipes, one bird covered the distance between Sweden and central Africa in 3.5 days! That’s 4225 miles (6800km). But wait. Another covered a distance of 3833 miles (6169km) in 3 days, while another made 2870 miles (4619km) in 2 days.
It’s not a wonder then that British soldiers from the late eighteenth century and through the nineteenth century used to gauge their marksmanship by hunting the snipe. Shoot down one, and you had passed the ultimate test. Btw, this was the origin of the name ‘sniper’.
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