Smashface: How It Pecks That Hard

by Thor Holmes
Collections Manager
KU Natural History Museum

You've got to love woodpeckers — and not just because they fly. One of their excellences is that they are piciforms, an order of critters that includes some of the coolest birds ever. Their family (Picidae) includes not only woodpeckers, but also the tiny piculets (think of them as woodpecker wannabes) and wrynecks. (Bird people have a way with names.) What's more, the woodpecker order is kin to still more astonishing birds, including honeyguides, barbets, and toucans.

Let's cut to the chase, though — the sexual one — as regards these birds. Along with feathers and wings, a common heritage of birdness is the absence of an intromittent organ (the unspeakable thing that boys have and girls lack). This renders ridiculous any sexual innuendo that one might make using the word "woodpecker." There is no doubt that female woodpeckers are as drawn to their mates as any other organism. But genital endowment has no role in this — though they are, of course, very flashy dressers. In contrast to many other birds, both males and females can be quite tricked out.

Woodpeckers have zygodactyl feet (two toes forward, two toes back) and bristly, stiff tail feathers. Both these adaptations allow woodpeckers to do an especially amazing thing. Once firmly grasping a tree trunk, or hanging under a branch with their unusual feet, their firm purchase braced by the tail, woodpeckers pound on the substrate (the scientific name for "limb," "shake shingle" or "siding") with their heads. More precisely, they whack away with their faces: more precisely still, with their bills. Most creatures could not get away with this for any length of time, but for woodpeckers, it's a lifestyle.

One that works: They number more than 200 species, ranging from tiny (less than 3 inches) to the gigantic Imperial Woodpecker (approaching 2 feet). When the big woodpeckers get working, wood literally flies. The first time I saw a pileated woodpecker it was tearing into a friend's shed. It was making sawdust of great coarseness, this at a rate I had never before witnessed.

"What kind of bird is that?"

"That's a God Almighty Woodpecker," he said emphatically.

For years, I mistook that for the animal's actual name.

Why do peckers peck? To excavate insects and their larvae from under bark, or out of wood itself. Beyond that, the racket from all the banging is a signal. Now as a birder I appreciate that look-over-here sound, but it's not me the bird's interested in. The bird is announcing its presence to others of its kind. This makes more understandable the flickers you can see around the KU campus banging on aluminum light poles and shades. These resonating objects make a very satisfying report when whacked upon. I presume other flickers in the vicinity, having heard the tapping, take him to be quite the guy.

One final woodpecker trait warrants mention. Once bark is stripped back, or crack is pried wider, or hole is gouged, the food item prompting the effort needs to be harvested. The woodpecker tongue is a help here. It is narrow, pointed, and, in many species barbed, not to mention astonishingly long and protrusible. The bones supporting it start in the tongue itself, proceed back around both sides of the neck, run up behind the skull, over the top of the head, down across the forehead, and stop at the nostril. I know this is true. I have seen it.

Woodpeckers can stick their tongues way, way out.

I've seen that too.