Imagine dealing with the hot weather we’ve been experiencing if your body couldn’t sweat to lower your body temperature. Imagine not having the air-conditioned car or home in which to retreat (some of us like to have an excuse to go into the icy interior of the local supermarket on hot days).

Birds, being covered with feathers, don’t sweat to dissipate heat. But they do have some physiological and behavioral strategies to keep them from overheating. Birds that are really hot will open their bills and pant. We have seen this most often with gulls and terns that are sitting on nests without shade in the full force of the sun. They sit with gaping bills, looking like they’d welcome an ice pop if you could give it to them. Birds also fluff out their feathers to allow more of their body heat to escape from their otherwise well-insulated feather bodysuit. If you see a robin or catbird looking fat and disheveled on a hot day, it’s probably because they’re using this technique to cool themselves.

Most birds will also use many of the same techniques that we humans employ for staying cool. Seeking out shade is one of the most obvious, and the dark interior of a bush or tree will also likely be among the best spots for evading most predators. The afternoon siesta — resting and sleeping rather than singing and feeding during the heat of the day — is another age-old behavior that we humans share with our avian neighbors as a way to cope with heat.

Jumping into cool water is our personal favorite way to make the high temperatures more bearable. Birds need water to drink, of course, but they also seem to use water to cool off. Gulls and terns that are caring for young will sometimes get their breast feathers wet under really hot conditions and tuck the nestlings in under the wet feathers to cool them. Ducks, loons, cormorants, and other waterbirds will  dive down and splash water over themselves like a kid in a pool. Songbirds will use a bird bath or the edge of a pond, lake, river, or other water body, dipping their head under while tossing water on their back with their wings. Recently, a number of Maine bird enthusiasts related their experiences in watching hummingbirds flying repeatedly through the mist of a garden hose as they watered their gardens. Swallows and swifts will dip down to the water’s surface while in flight and wet the breast feathers.

Vultures have a strategy to cool themselves that we don’t recommend—they are said to defecate on the legs to cool them. Better yet, they and other soaring birds like ospreys, eagles, and hawks, can rise high into the sky on rising air currents to reach cooler temps. That’s another strategy we don’t recommend, unless it means you’re in a plane heading ... some place cool.