Doug Velting
You know that the bat is skilled at echolocation, and maybe have heard that the dolphin and sperm whale have the same skill. But have you ever heard of a bird that can locate things using sound? There is one: the South American oilbird.
Oilbirds are grouped with other night-hunting birds, including the eastern whip-poor-will, but are different enough to be classified as the only members of their genus.
This 12-inch bird’s home range lies in northern South America. It is a nocturnal, fruit-eating bird with excellent night vision and a keen sense of smell that they use to locate fruit, which they pluck from trees while hovering. Oilbirds may travel up to 150 miles in a single night as they look for avocados and palm fruit.
Oilbirds make clicking sounds for echolocation to navigate the dark caves where they spend the daylight hours. While bats emit their sounds at frequencies too high for human detection, oilbirds emit a series of sharp sounds audible to humans that ricochet off objects such as a cave wall, providing a map of the terrain ahead. Each bird clicks at a slightly different frequency, so they can know which click is theirs and not those among the thousands in the colony.
Like a few other night-hunting birds, the oilbird has specialized feather “whiskers” that help it feel around in the pitch black darkness of the caves in which it lives. This is helpful when building nests and taking care of the young. They build their nests out of regurgitated fruit and their own droppings on ledges in caves. The females hatch between two to four eggs and feed their chicks with rich, fatty fruit, causing the young to quickly become fluffy and fat. In fact, oilbirds get their name from their plump baby birds.
While the evolutionists are stumped trying to discover why a fruit-eating bird would need so many extraordinary feathers, we know that God has lavished the South American oilbird with an amazing design that can only point to their all-knowing and all-powerful Creator God.
The heavens are thine, the earth also is thine; the world and all that is in it, thou hast founded them. (Psalms 89:11)
