How Woodpeckers Turn Their Entire Bodies into Pecking Machines

"Woodpeckers operate at an extreme level, boring through solid wood with forces more than 30 times their own weight and drilling up to 13 times a second. How do they never miss a beat while head banging so hard? It turns out that the birds tense up their entire body to smash through wood, letting out short, explosive grunts with each strike, report Brown University biologist Nicholas Antonson and his colleagues in the Journal of Experimental Biology."

"They also checked whether the woodpeckers held their breath during exertion (like weight lifters tend to do) or exhaled (like tennis players) while striking the wood by examining airflow through the birds' air sacssmall, balloonlike structures that help them breathe in and out. By matching these measurements with high-speed videos, the scientists tracked the woodpeckers' taps down to every four milliseconds."

Downy Woodpeckers bore into solid wood with forces exceeding thirty times their body weight and can strike up to thirteen times per second. Birds tense every muscle from head to tail and emit short, explosive grunts with each peck. Electrode recordings were taken from eight wild individuals using implanted electrodes connected to backpack recorders while airflow through air sacs measured breathing. High-speed video synchronized with muscle and airflow data resolved strikes to four‑millisecond precision. Measurements showed the birds exhale with each strike rather than holding their breath, enabling rapid, repeated, high‑force impacts.

Read at www.scientificamerican.com