Athletic Drill

Woodpeckers turn their entire bodies into tapping machines

- Rohini Subrahmanyam

Tapping woodpeckers harness their muscles more like tennis players than like weight lifters.

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. “Woodpeckers really are nature’s hammer in a sense,” Antonson says.