Can birds fog up windows/mirrors?
December 20, 2014 8:41 PM   Subscribe

Imagine a large bird like an ostrich. Could its breath fog up a window? We are watching Jurassic Park and wondering if the raptors' breath could fog up the window in the kitchen door.
posted by curious nu to Pets & Animals (4 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: I have seen my cockatiel make little misty spots on mirrors when he's close to them, so I'd say the answer is yes
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 8:56 PM on December 20, 2014


Best answer: Once, when I was a child, a sparrow got into our chimney and ended up in our kitchen. I remember standing outside and seeing its breath fog up the windows before it eventually got out.
posted by rjs at 9:25 PM on December 20, 2014


Best answer: Unless they're warm blooded, they won't do this. Birds are warm blooded. Apparently the current thinking on dinosaurs is people aren't really sure.

What's going on is the warm air leaving your lungs holds more moisture than it can when it is cooled down by a thermally conductive room temperature thing like a piece of glass or metal, and it deposits the excess moisture on the glass. If the air isn't warmer than the glass, this won't happen.
posted by aubilenon at 12:49 AM on December 21, 2014


Best answer: There is research that dinosaurs occupied a middle ground; able to self-regulate their temperature, but only up to a point - like tuna. Mammals and modern birds grow much faster than reptiles, and have a much faster metabolic rate (warm blooded creatures use waste heat from their high metabolism to well, keep them warm). Using dinosaur bone rings to estimate growth rate allowed them to infer metabolic rate and found dinosaurs sat in the middle between reptiles and mammals/birds; which implies they were able to control their own body temperature somewhat, but not as much as warm blooded animals do.

There's also evidence that fossil birds had slower growth rates than modern birds, which indicates that birds weren't always fully warm blooded.

Anyway; assuming that research is correct, then the raptors would probably have been warmer than their environment, and thus have warmer breath, and thus would cause condensation on a cold surface, i.e. fog up the glass like a big bird would - though maybe not as much!

We'll just gloss over the thing where they should have had feathers.
posted by ArkhanJG at 1:23 AM on December 21, 2014 [1 favorite]


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