How woodpeckers turn their entire bodies into pecking machines

How woodpeckers turn their entire bodies into pecking machines

By Rohini Subramaniam Edited by Sarah Levin Frazier

Woodpeckers work at extreme levels, boring into solid wood with a force 30 times their own weight and up to 13 times a second. How come they don’t miss a beat even while banging their heads so hard?

It turns out that the birds strain their entire bodies to break the wood and emit short, explosive growls with each strike, report Brown University biologist Nicholas Antonson and his colleagues. In Journal of Experimental Biology“Woodpeckers are really nature’s hammer in a sense,” says Antonson,

To study how the birds tap, researchers first humanely captured eight wild Downy Woodpeckers and carefully inserted electrodes into their muscles in the laboratory. Electrodes were inserted into a small, fitted backpack that recorded electrical signals from muscle contractions when the birds pecked. They also examined whether woodpeckers hold their breath during exertion (like weightlifters do) or exhale when striking wood (like tennis players), by examining the flow of air through the birds’ air sacs – small, balloon-like structures that help them inhale and exhale. By matching these measurements with high-speed video, scientists tracked the woodpecker’s taps every four milliseconds.

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Instead of using a single muscle to control the action, woodpeckers “activated every muscle from head to tail,” says Antonson. Birds use their powerful hip flexors to propel themselves forward, clench their tail and abdomen in preparation for attack, and stiffen the back of their head and neck on contact – just as you might stiffen the back of your wrist when hammering a nail. They then engaged a different set of hip and neck muscles to pull back.

Antonsson explains that birds have perfected their beaks with sharp exhalations, “as another means of stabilizing their core muscles and providing power through those attacks.” “To be able to exhale 13 times per second and inhale on the order of 40 milliseconds is really impressive.” Songbirds, which are not closely related to woodpeckers, are the only other birds known to precisely time their breathing, as they sing.

“Pecking is a whole-body exercise,” says Nicole Ackermans, a biologist at the University of Alabama who studies brain damage in woodpeckers and head ramming sheepCoordinating “subtle breaths” with muscle stiffness and “creating a hammer-like structure throughout their body is a unique approach,” she adds,

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