Can Hummingbirds Snore?

The bird in this viral video is more likely stressed than it is dreaming.

With more than 2.7 million views, you may already know about the snoring hummingbird video, footage that resulted from a scientific study measuring hummingbird oxygen consumption. 

Now, for the debunking: This Amethyst-throated Sunangel is not exactly sleeping and it鈥檚 certainly not snoring. 鈥淗ummingbirds don鈥檛 snore,鈥 says , a hummingbird researcher from the University of Connecticut. 鈥淭his is not natural for a resting behavior.鈥

Something about the bird is indeed off. The open mouth and exposed tongue are strange, says Rico-Guevara, who how hummingbirds drink nectar in 2011. 鈥淭hey don鈥檛 like their tongues drying out.鈥

The video鈥檚 publisher, who was studying for a masters degree in ornithology upon publishing the video three years ago, that the hummingbird鈥檚 mouth is open because it is taking in extra oxygen to come out of 鈥攁 short, nightly hibernation in which birds lower their breathing rate and body temperature to conserve energy on cool evenings.

But Rico-Guevara has seen hummingbirds in torpor, and he says that while they may to get warm, 鈥渢hey never make noises like this.鈥

What we鈥檙e hearing, he thinks, is more likely a sound of stress. Rico-Guevara captures Amethyst-throated Sunangels in mist nests for his research, and recalls juveniles sometimes emitting distress noises oddly similar to this 鈥渟nore.鈥

鈥淭o me, this is a juvenile calling for help,鈥 says Rico-Guevara. (He knows it鈥檚 a young bird thanks to the yellow coloring on the corner of the mouth, which serves as a target for parents to feed their fledglings.) From a purely logical viewpoint, he adds, it makes no sense for a bird to sleepily snore in a predator-packed forest all night鈥斺淪noring is not adaptive!鈥 In people,  leads to more broken sleep than it does to anything beneficial.

The good news is that even if the bird wasn't snoring, this little one made out all right. 鈥淎fter the experiment was done, I watched the bird fly away myself, it was fine,鈥 the video鈥檚 author . 鈥淭he welfare of birds means the world to me, and I am dedicating my career to their conservation.鈥