Among some new bird books, a few slabs of pre-packaged suet (they make good stocking stuffers!), and a beautiful hand-carved, hand-painted evening grosbeak tree ornament, we got a few things that have absolutely nothing to do with birds.

Or maybe they do.

Have you seen those new-fangled fitness trackers? They attach to the wrist and track your every movement—steps taken from the living room to the whistling teakettle, steps from the doorstep to the recycling bins in the garage, even “active minutes”—time spent intentionally exercising, which thanks to our 13-year-old basketball-loving son, has been satisfyingly high. The tracker is a tool to help you set activity goals to ensure you’re living a healthy life—yes, it keeps track of calories and cups of water consumed, but you enter these numbers yourself.

We have become quite captivated by this little gadget, finding it to be pretty revealing about how much time we actually spend moving around. We found, for example, that it’s fairly easy to take more than 10,000 steps in the course of a normal day’s activities. Add to that the active minutes and we were feeling pretty good about ourselves.

We also couldn’t resist thinking about all of this in terms of birds. What might a bird’s fitness tracker tell us? Consider the bird equivalent to our human steps: wingbeats. Not surprisingly the birds that beat the wings the fastest are hummingbirds. Our familiar ruby-throated hummingbird is said to beat its wings 70 times per second. In a sustained hour of migratory flight at that rate, it would have beaten its wings 252,000 times; if it migrated for four hours each day on its way to Mexico back in August, it would have beaten its wings over a million times. To top it off, in the spring, ruby-throated hummingbirds are thought to fly across the Gulf of Mexico from the Yucatan Peninsula to the Gulf Coast in a single flight that may take up to 24 hours! 

Large birds, on the other hand, flap their wings more slowly. Herring gulls and great blue herons beat their wings at a rate of 2-3 times per second. Of course gulls, like hawks and some other birds, know how to save energy and often soar for extended periods without flapping their wings at all. But when they are flapping in direct flight, as they often do when they are migrating, they may flap their wings over 10,000 times per hour. Mallards flap on average about 5 times per second, which would account for 18,000 wingbeats in an hour. 

How far does all that flapping get some of these birds during a day of migration? Farther than you might think! According to The Bird Almanac (written, believe it or not, by David Bird), a banded mallard was calculated to have flown at least 276 miles in a day. That pales in comparison to the more than 700 miles covered in one day by a ruddy turnstone! Even our little familiar barn swallow can clock over 100 miles in a day, and a white-crowned sparrow made it more than 300 miles during an extended 12-hour migration period.

In looking at these data, we wondered how our 16,000+ daily steps would translate to flight if we were birds? Wait—it turns out the fitness tracker does tell us. All that effort gives us about eight miles—not even the distance from Wiscasset to Boothbay!

Jeffrey V. Wells, Ph.D., is a Fellow of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Dr. Wells is one of the nation's leading bird experts and conservation biologists, and author of “Birder’s Conservation Handbook.” His grandfather, the late John Chase, was a columnist for the Boothbay Register for many years. Allison Childs Wells, formerly of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is a senior director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine, a statewide nonprofit membership organization. Both are widely published natural history writers and coauthors of the book, “Maine’s Favorite Birds.”