How Woodpeckers Turn Their Entire Bodies into Pecking Machines

How woodpeckers turn their entire bodies into pecking machines

TO Rohini Subrahmanyam edited by Sarah Levin Fraser

Woodpeckers operate at extreme levels, boring into hard wood with more than 30 times their own weight in force and drilling up to 13 times per second. How they never miss a single detail I'm banging my head so hard?

It turns out that the birds use their entire body to break through the wood, producing short, explosive grunts with each strike, Brown University biologist Nicholas Antonson and his colleagues report. V Journal of Experimental Biology. “Woodpeckers really are nature’s hammer in some ways,” Antonson says.

To study how the birds tap, the researchers first humanely captured eight wild downy woodpeckers and carefully inserted electrodes into their muscles in the laboratory. The electrodes were fed into a tiny backpack, which recorded electrical signals from muscle contractions as the birds pecked. They also tested whether woodpeckers hold their breath while exercising (as weightlifters typically do) or exhale (like tennis players) when hitting wood, by examining the flow of air through the birds' air sacs—small, balloon-like structures that help them inhale and exhale. By combining these measurements with high-speed videos, the scientists tracked the woodpeckers' tapping movements with an accuracy of four milliseconds.

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Instead of using one muscle to control an action, woodpeckers activated “every muscle from head to tail,” Antonson says. The birds used their powerful hip flexors to propel themselves forward, clenched their tails and abs to prepare for impact, and tensed the back of their heads and necks on contact—similar to how you might tense the back of your wrist when driving a nail. They then used a different set of hip and neck muscles to pull back.

The birds also ideally combined pecks with sharp exhalations “as another means of stabilizing the core muscles and amplifying those strikes,” Antonson explains. “To be able to exhale 13 times per second and inhale for about 40 milliseconds is really impressive.” Songbirds, which are not closely related to woodpeckers, are the only birds that so precisely time the breathing they do while singing.

“Pecking is a full-body exercise,” says University of Alabama biologist Nicole Akermans, who studies brain damage in woodpeckers and sheep banging its head. Coordinating “micro-breathing” with muscle contraction and creating a “hammer-like structure throughout the body is such a unique approach,” she adds.

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