Hummingbirds are the speed freaks of the bird family. They eat a prodigious amount of food daily in order to meet their metabolic demands. If you were to scale up the hummingbird's daily ration to human size, it would be around 155 000 calories each day. So, for a human to keep pace with a hummingbird calorie-wise, you would have to consume:
The other particularly interesting thing about the metabolism of hummingbirds is that they must go into
torpor while sleeping in order not to starve to
death. Essentially, the animals go into a
coma each evening, slowing their
cardiac and
respiratory rates dramatically.