“This Woodpecker Will Drill Into Your Skull And Eat Your Brains—If You’re a Baby Dove,” explains an article by Jason Bittel in Smithsonian magazine. It says: In 2015, Harold Greeney [pictured here, horizontal] trained his camera on a mourning dove nest stitched into the crook of a cactus. As an ornithologist, Greeney studies the love […]
Tag: woodpeckers
Dr. Schwab explains why woodpeckers don’t get headaches
Dr. Ivan Schwab explains why woodpeckers don’t get headaches, in this Discovery Channel video: He explains it in more detail, in this TEDx Talk: Dr. Schwab, of the University of California Davis, and the late Philip R.A. May of the University of California Los Angeles, were awarded the 2006 Ig Nobel Prize for ornithology, for exploring […]
Woodpeckers, too, can be confused
When woodpeckers drill into a tree trunk, their skulls can experience mechanical shocks in excess of 1,200 g – hundreds of times stronger than the g-forces which astronauts might experience – and yet the birds do not appear to be in any way damaged, and are apparently immune to headaches. But what would happen to […]
Woodpeckers – the shock potential
“A woodpecker is known to drum the hard woody surface of a tree at a rate of 18 to 22 times per second with a deceleration of 1200 g, yet with no sign of blackout or brain damage.” Suggesting, to some, the question : “How does the bird strike its beak against a tree repeatedly […]