Drill baby drill: Woodpeckers pack a lot of power behind their beak

(CN) — Woodpeckers have a reputation for making a racket on a quiet morning with their unremitting clobbers, so it may be no surprise new evidence reveals the extreme power behind their drilling.

In a study published in the Journal of Experimental Biology on Thursday, five scientists at Brown University and a bird song expert from the University of Münster in Germany found downy woodpeckers brace their head, neck, abdomen and tail muscles to hold their bodies in a certain way, enabling the hammer-like pounding necessary to get at the meal inside trees.

“What is really exciting about this study is that it tells us howthey do what they do,” Nicholas Antonson, a postdoctoral research associate in the department of ecology, evolution and organismal biology at Brown and a co-author of the study, said in an email.

“Woodpeckers take their name seriously and the pecking behaviors they use to navigate the world are quite extreme and difficult to perform compared to other birds,” he said.

https://www.courthousenews.com/drill-baby-drill-woodpeckers-pack-a-lot-of-power-behind-their-beaks/