One question that may not have crossed your mind recently is: Why doesn’t a woodpecker’s beak get stuck in the wood of the tree as it pecks? After all, when we hammer a nail, if we’ve done it right, the nail doesn’t come back out again. Woodpeckers are driving their beaks into wood with the same kind of force we use to drive nails, but the beaks come back out again. So, what’s happening here?
A frame-by-frame analysis of video of woodpeckers banging away at hardwood trees revealed some clues.
Once the tip of the woodpecker’s bill hits the wood, the bird’s head rotates to the side ever so slightly, lifting the top part of the beak and twisting it a bit in the other direction, the videos reveal. This pull opens the bill a tiny amount and creates free space between the beak tip and the wood at the bottom of the punctured hole, so the bird can then easily retract its beak.
Until now, scientists have thought woodpecker bills would need to be rigidly attached to the skull to successfully drill into the wood to find insect prey. But actually, the bill’s flexibility in these joints ensures that the bird’s signature “rat-a-tat-tat” doesn’t stop at “rat.”
Here is the video:
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