Chicken Little? Is he related to the world’s smallest bantam, known as the Malaysian Serama Bantam – the smallest and lightest bantam chicken in the world? Serama hens can weigh as little as 155gms (that’s just a bit more than a pot of yoghurt!). They are between 15 and 25cm tall. The Serama is a new breed of bantam, having been developed within the past 15 years.
However it is positively enormous next to the world's smallest bird, the bee hummingbird from Cuba. It is only 2.5 inches in length (6.2 cm) and weighs a mere 0.06 oz (1.6 g).
What was it that Chicken Little was so afraid of? The sky falling down? Well can it? No actually. The thing is, the sky isn’t solid. The sky as we know it is called the atmosphere. It is a mixture of different gases and particles known as air which surrounds the Earth. The atmosphere protects us by filtering out deadly cosmic rays, powerful ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the Sun, and even meteors on collision course with Earth. It is made up of several very distinct layers. The first layer is known as the troposphere and it’s 10km thick. This layer is where most of the weather takes place. Above this there are no clouds.
So why is the sky blue? White light is a mixture of seven colours. In a rainbow we see them as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. The Earth's sky is blue because the air molecules are much smaller than the wavelength of light. When light encounters particles much smaller than its wavelength, light is scattered in all directions. Blue light, is much more readily scattered than the other colours. In fact blue light is scattered some 16 times more strongly than red light. Consequently, the sky appears blue.
Click here if you want to know more about the atmosphere and why the sky is blue.
As for Chicken Little, if you want to read his story then click here.
Talking of birds, people are being warned not to dump their pet birds over fears about bird flu. The National Parrot Sanctuary in Lincolnshire recently found 23 parrots and an owl abandoned outside their gates. The shocked birds were left in the freezing cold overnight, and three are now ill with frostbite. People should remember pet birds won't catch flu if kept indoors.
Bird flu is not the same disease that we get when we talk about people having flu in the UK. The bird flu is caused by the avian influenza virus HN51.
It mainly affects birds and so far several million chickens have either died or had to be killed because of the disease.
If you want to know more about bird flu then checkout the BBC Newsround website
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