10 flighty facts: For #GlobalBigDay, engage bird brains

As humans become more addicted to their mobile devices and sharing data, interest in birding apps and counting birds is also on the rise.

This Saturday, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is sponsoring its inaugural #GlobalBigDay. Birders around the world will compete to identify — by sight or sound — as many birds as they can in 24 hours. Data can be submitted through eBird, a dynamic, crowdsourcing site that is the brainchild of the Cornell Lab and the National Audubon Society. It tracks bird populations, migrations and irruptions via reports from members, practically in real time.

Who knows? Folks might live-stream their birding adventures using Periscope or Meerkat so anyone can piggyback on the discoveries.

To get you going, here are some fun facts about birds you might spy in your own backyard.

1. Don't be chicken. The chicken may not look ferocious, but it has a very tough cousin. Chickens are the closest-living relative of the Tyrannosaurus rex.

2. European starlings are spooky. Not in a scary sense, but they abhor making eye contact with other creatures or being watched through binoculars and camera lenses, says Ted Floyd of the American Birding Association. It's hard to get good photos of them, he says, but if you could get a good look, you'd see that the base of their bills are perfectly sex-coordinated: pale pink for females and baby blue for males.

3. "Eating like a bird" is a fallacy. Doves, for instance, must consume between 12% and 20% of their body weight and drink 5%-8% of their weight in water each day. That's the equivalent of a 150-pound person eating up to 30 pounds of food or drinking "like a fish."

4. Is it a bird ... or Superman? Arctic terns take the gold for the longest migration of any bird. It can travel nearly 50,000 miles in a year.

5. Landing on the ear. Many birds can hear the details in sound far better than humans can, says Donald Kroodsma, author of The Singing Life of Birds. The simple "cheeps" of a male house sparrow — that ubiquitous breed hopping near the feet of outdoor-cafe patrons — must sound like a symphony to an interested female. And the female wood thrush hears magic in her mate's song, as he has a pair of voice boxes and can sing a duet with himself — singing two different songs simultaneously. (Bobby McFerrin much?)

6. Is it good luck if a bird poops on you? Some believe so; for a city dweller, the odds of it happening might be better than winning the lottery. In agrarian times, pigeon poop was like liquid gold — it often was used as a dowry because it served as good fertilizer. Just don't throw it on the bride. (Don't throw rice, either; the birds that come nibbling can't digest it.)

7. Eyes in the back of their heads. Owls can't move their eyes (no eyeballs) but can turn their heads and necks up to 270 degrees — that's about three-quarters of a circle. They also have a degree of binocular vision.

8. Special delivery — air mail. Bee hummingbirds are so small you could mail 16 of them for the price of a single stamp, observes Noah Strycker, author of The Thing With Feathers. (Don't try this at home.)

9. Talk about threatened. Kiwi birds, the smallest relative of the ostrich, lay the largest eggs in proportion to the bird's size — about six times as big as the "normal" scale and about a quarter of its body mass. That's like a human giving birth to a 4-year-old, according to the National Audubon Society. And the endangered New Zealand native bird is pretty defenseless: It's flightless and nearly blind, so it hunts by smell. Only about 5% of baby kiwis reach adulthood.

10. Speed demons. One of the fastest birds in the world is the peregrine falcon. When the falcon dives, it may reach 200 mph, according to the National Audubon Society

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