What is the highest flying bird?

The swan is a large water bird with an elegant long neck. The white swan has pure white feathers and a black beak with a yellow base. The black swan is completely black, with a red beak and scattered white feathers that make the black swan very colorful.

Swans are migratory birds that inhabit lakes and swamps. In winter, they migrate in groups to the south in search of food. The flying swans have straight necks, slightly raised, and their wings flap gracefully. It flies over Mount Everest regularly every year at an altitude of 9,144 meters, making it the highest flying bird in the world.

Swans belong to the family Aves and Anatidae. In the entire swan family, there are whooper swans, cygnets and mute swans in our country. They are both world-famous ornamental birds. Swans are winter migratory birds that like to live in groups in lakes and swamps and eat mainly aquatic plants. Every year in March and April, large groups of them fly from the south to the north to lay eggs and reproduce in Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Heilongjiang, Qinghai and other places. After October, the weather turns cold, and they move south in groups with their young and old. The whooper swan is all white, except for its head, which is slightly sticky brown, and its beak, which is black. The yellow spots on both sides of the base of the upper beak stretch forward to under the nostrils. The cygnets are only slightly smaller than the whooper swans, and the yellow spots on both sides of the base of the upper mouth do not extend forward to below the nostrils. Mute swans have red beaks and black warts on their foreheads. Swans generally move in pairs, with one male and one female living in close proximity. If one is killed, the other will hover over the corpse and die of grief.

Whooper swans are also called coughing swans, trumpeter swans, yellow-billed swans, etc., with a body length of 120 to 160 centimeters and a weight of 6,500 to 12,000 grams. The feathers all over the body are snow-white, only the head and the base of the bill are slightly brown, and the ends of the bill and feet are black. Its body is fat and plump, and the length of its neck is the largest proportion of the body length among birds, even exceeding the body length. The legs are short and the feet are webbed. When swimming forward, the legs and feet are folded together to reduce resistance; when pushing back through the water, the webbed feet are fully opened to form a surface that resembles a paddle, and the water is alternately stroked. , such as the flat ground. It also often coats its feathers with oil secreted by the caudal fat glands in its tail to keep them waterproof. The whooper swan has very rich feathers. Some people have calculated that it has 25,216 feathers on its body, so it can effectively withstand severe cold weather and can survive overnight in the open air at temperatures as low as minus 36 to 48 degrees Celsius.

The beak of the whooper swan is rich in touch receptors, called Heber corpuscles, which are mainly located inside the tips of the upper and lower beaks. There are 27 per square millimeter on the edge of the upper beak alone, which is more than that of humans. There are even more on its fingers. It relies on the sensitive sense of touch at the edge of its mouth to find aquatic plants such as water chrysanthemums and sedges in the water. Sometimes it also captures small animals such as insects and earthworms for food.

The whooper swan is a migratory bird with no subspecies differentiation. In spring and autumn, it migrates between breeding areas in northern my country, Siberia, Russia, and wintering areas in the Yangtze River Basin and south of my country. Every April, when the water in the north has just melted and thawed, whooper swans that have migrated long distances arrive in their breeding grounds in droves almost overnight. They landed in pairs on the quiet lake, some playing together, innocent and lively; some rubbing their necks, tender and loving; some arranging their feathers with their mouths, leisurely and contented; some plunged into the water and danced gracefully, which is really diverse. , dizzying.