Hummingbird pulls Top Gun stunts: for its size, the courting flier dives faster than a fighter jet.

They may wear too much pink to fit in among macho fliers. But when male Anna's hummingbirds swoop out of the sky, they pull more g's than any known vertebrate stunt flier outside a cockpit, says Chris Clark of the University of California, Berkeley.

During courtship displays, a male hummingbird soars to some 30 meters and then dives, whizzing by a female so fast that his tail feathers chirp in the wind. As the bird pulls out of his plunge to avoid crashing, he experiences forces more than nine times the force of gravity, Clark reports online June 9 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

"They look like a little magenta fire ball dropping out of the sky," Clark says.

This study shows "to what extraordinary lengths these birds are willing to go to impress potential mates," says Doug Altshuler of the University of California, Riverside. It could open new opportunities for studying sexual selection.

Clark set out a caged female or a stuffed female to inspire birds to dive in front of his video cameras. Analyzing the recordings revealed that birds at first flapped their wings as they dove. For short periods, the birds folded their wings and drilled down through the air reaching speeds up to 27.3 meters per second (61 miles per hour).

Adjust for body length, and the world just got a new fastest bird, Clark says. The hummingbirds' speed reached 385 body lengths per second, easily beating the peregrine falcon's recorded dives at 200 body lengths per second. A fighter jet with its afterburners on reaches 150 body lengths per second, and a space shuttle screaming down through the atmosphere hits 207 body lengths per second.

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