Birds come in all sorts of shapes and sizes: there are small birds and tall birds, short birds and big birds. Some birds can fly far distances across the Earth, and others don’t even have wings.

“I wanted to be a falconer but it just never worked. My mother wouldn’t let me have one in the house, and that was the end of that,” Bird says. As he got older he became interested in spreading the word about birds, particularly raptors and other birds of prey. But one day when out birding with a grad student, Bird spotted an Anna’s hummingbird, a stocky, 4-inch-long bird, and his perspective changed. (Related: read about how the world’s smallest birds survive