Why woodpeckers can hammer without getting headaches (2022) | Hacker News Reader

Why woodpeckers can hammer without getting headaches (2022)

birdwatchingdaily.com

103 pointssandebert45 comments

> The woodpecker’s head strikes with at least 1,000 times the force of gravity (1,000 g), yet the bird suffers no apparent harm. By contrast, any human who experienced a 100 g impact would surely die.

Nope, not true. 100 g accelerations of the human head (not just the helmet) happen routinely in football.

> VT researchers gather data with the Head Impact Telemetry System, which employs sensors and wireless transmitters in helmets. "We see 100-g impacts all the time," says Stefan Duma, director of the university's Center for Injury Biomechanics, "and several over 150 g's."

In generally, using g's (acceleration) to measure impact severity is fraught because the damage is also highly dependent on the during of the impact. Just a few g's is enough to kill if sustained for long enough. Fighter pilots can handle 8-9 gees for a second or two, but will pass out after longer. But a human can handle way more from brief (sub second) impacts.

Just watched the movie "Concussion" with Will Smith.

Sort of amazing the sort of punishment football players heads withstand... but they DO die much earlier in life with lots of complications.

"The woodpecker's tongue extends through the back of the mouth out of the nostril, encircling the entire cranium. It is the anatomical equivalent of a safety belt for its brain. Human beings? Not a single piece of our anatomy protects us from those types of collisions. A human being will get concussed at sixty G's."

also:

  "The Cape gannet.

  A diving bird capable of generating speeds
  of up to 75 miles per hour,

  turning itself into a missile
  as it collides with the face of the sea.

  The red-head woodpecker
  can absorb a G-force of 1,000,
  pecking a tree 12,000 times per day,
  85 million times over its lifetime.

  Bighorn sheep can generate..."

  "Bennet."

  "Okay, okay."

I thought concussion was from the brain sloshing around inside the skull. How does a tongue "set-belt" around the skull help with that?

> The woodpecker's tongue extends through the back of the mouth out of the nostril, encircling the entire cranium.

Don't think this protects the brain. This allows it to hold tension like a spring so it can hammer (think about those springed door stops you flicked as a kid and the sound it makes). https://cdn.aws.toolstation.com/images/141020-UK/800/22940.j...

> Fighter pilots can handle 8-9 gees for a second or two, but will pass out after longer

Except this guy who eats 9g for breakfast...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0nbRYIBVDQ

the impulse (force/time) is probably a better measure

Impulse isn't force over (divided by) time, it's the integral of force over (with respect to) time.

Based on eyeballing the charts here, it looks like

(accel)^4(time)

better approximates the boundary of human endurance: doubling the number of gees cuts the amount of endurable time by more like a factor of 16 than 2.

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/6154/maximum-survi...

Its really a sound wave pulsing through the grey mush of each brain, so some measure of stress (force/area) or strain (differential displacement/area) might be the beast way to look at it. The damage might be done in shear where the center of the brain moves while the outside is stuck to the skull, but it would be really hard to measure that.

Maybe woodpecker brains are more free to wobble around inside their skulls so shear stresses and strains are lower than they are in people?

This explanation is apparently controversial

https://www.science.org/content/article/contrary-popular-bel...

> Whether digging for food, constructing housing, or luring mates, woodpeckers bang their heads into trees about 20 times per second.

Is that correct? I can't wrap my head around this, how is it possible that they do it so fast?

If you've ever heard a wood pecker in action, 20/second doesn't sound completely crazy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6XOyUey4nQ

Interesting how its more like a bouncing ball easing off the bounce, instead of a pneumatic hammer.

I don't know how they work internally, but I can say that power hammers used for blacksmithing sound similar to the woodpecker in the video, only much slower. A couple hard, fast hits with absurd force before slowing down and stopping.

I'm guessing the woodpecker behaves that way because it's putting momentum into the hitting, even if that doesn't totally make sense in my head. When hammering on something, it's easiest to let the gravity do most of the work and focus your effort on aiming and raising the hammer, so you naturally have 1-2 hits that are solely momentum based at the end.

The woodpecker is horizontal, though, - not pecking in line with gravity - so my thought process isn't a perfect analogue. But if their tongue works like a spring then I can imagine it making sense.

Whatever energy goes back into the bounce necessarily isn't going into the tree.

The woodpecker is constantly applying it's force toward the tree so the bounce dampens over time.

Scaling laws help.

They definitely don't peck this fast when digging for food or making holes - those are slower more powerful strikes. The fasy drums are for the purpose of making noise.

I'm somewhat convinced woodpeckers are smart, conniving creatures.

I always kept suet out, and they love it. All hours of the day, hanging upside down eating at it.

But, if I ever forgot to replace it when it ran empty, I'd be awaken at the crack of dawn by a woodpecker hammering the window awning. Only when the suet was empty.

Maybe it's coincidence, but I like to believe he was trying to remind me they needed more suet in the most annoying way.

Or, if they couldn't find the easy food, they had to go dig for grubs in the trees

Well, that would be a natural explanation if it were any of the 10 thousand nearby trees, or telephone poles even, and not the window awning.

But it could just coincidentally be there were a lot of bugs in that awning, admittedly.

Sounds like instinct at play. Woodpecker found a food source, came back and it was dried up, and naturally, it started digging to find more where that came from.

But what do I know, I'm just Monday morning armchair ornithologist!

TIL, don't hang a bird feeder of any type that close to a window.

I guess we had a woodpecker that just hated us for some reason a few years back. We live in a log home but this bird decided it had to hammer on the metal gutters first thing in the morning. Sounded like a machine gun.

I believe it. I once had a bluejay that frequented my birdfeeder and would hammer on my bedroom window whenever the feeder ran dry. He'd peck at the glass so hard I thought it might break.

How do we know they don't get headaches? Did they ask them?

I believe they look for evidence of rejected mating advances around bedtime.

So, this only accounts for headaches that make you less sexually active?

whoosh

Had a woodpecker in the hood a few years ago that liked to bang on metal lightpoles, to no ill effect. The apparent spouse would usually come shoo them off the pole after awhile, unproductive as such work is. Made quite a noise though.

"Everything the light touches" is "within earshot" for woodpeckers, so they do like to hammer away on such items: https://youtu.be/F0v-CukKW5Y

Every now and then one will get on my chimney. It will peck on something metal and the sound echos down and comes out my fireplace. It makes a really cool sound.

Afraid to admit how long I've pondered the incredible evolutionary feat that is the woodpecker.

For the first time in my 36 years, I saw one out the window Saturday morning after I woke up. I felt like I was in the presence of a celebrity, and found myself semi-aghast at how excited I was. I tried really hard to get a video but he flew off. For those 15-20 seconds, watching him work was a treat. Life's simple pleasures I guess.

Get you a small shepherd's hook and a suet cage. He'll never leave your side!

I was inspired by your comment and started to look into this. We have kestrels that congregate around the house that I think would ravage the suet but I may try anyway.

For all the times that I’ve seen woodpeckers at work. I only see them banging as hard as they could during mating season, as to make as much sound as possible to signal vitality. All other times I’ve seen them at work they’re calmly chipping away at a tree like a woodworker with a chisel, and no way near there max strength. Almost all articles I read only seem to mention that a woodpecker hammers as hard as possible all dag long which just isn’t true.

Also for anyone hearing a woodpecker banging metal, it’s the sound signaling during mating season. Dampen the metal and he’ll find another place.

Ah, I mentioned in another comment that we had a woodpecker do this at our house, a log home but it went after the metal gutters. That explanation makes a lot of sense.

That is a fairly amazing tongue. Had a flicker in the yard the other day but did not get to see that tongue, will have to watch for it in the future.

We have lots of northern flickers where I live and they seem particularly keen to machine gun hammer on the eaves of my house at 5am.

If you haven't already, you should check to see if you have rot or some kind of insect infestation. Around here, at least, they typically only go after wood with bugs inside.

Those fuckers woild pound on my gutters for hours. Never once on anything other than the aluminum gutters. But they love the loud hammering sound, as it calls out to potential mates. So when they find something loud they will tend to come back to it.

A couple years ago a wooden power pole (well specked with woodpecker drilled holes over the decades) in my backyard was replaced with a fiberglass one. At least one local woodpecker hasn't realized the futility of hammering on it to the tune of honestly almost cartoonish hollow BONK BONK BONK sounds, and continues to try to find a meal in the thing.

I feel bad for the bird at this point.

Not unusual... I have two metal towers running through the back third of my property. The flickers love to bang on them, it really amplifies the sound. I assumed it was more a mating/attention thing.

Yeah I think they're hammering on some component of my metal roof as it has a very metallic sound. I love birds in general but have considered loading my 22 with bird shot on multiple occasions when they wake me out of a deep sleep.

hummingbirds also have similar tongues, not certain if they wrap around the head.

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