A Perfectly Designed Bird

4 A Perfectly Designed Bird Everything in the natural world works effectively. Take a look at woodpeckers, for example, and you'll understand. Woodpeckers are found everywhere except in Australia. There are more than 180 different kinds of woodpeckers- some are rare and some are plentiful in numbers. They can live from five to ten years and eat mainly insects. Woodpeckers are birds. Nothing strange about that. But if you watch a woodpecker at work, you might think, “ That must give it a terrible headache. " After all, a wood- pecker taps its head against wood nearly 12, 000 times a day. Doing something like that all day long must hurt! Think of how you would feel if you hit your head only once against something hard.

However, in nature, everything happens for a reason. Woodpeckers are perfectly designed for the life they live. They have long, sharp beaks which they use to make holes in trees to find tasty insects inside. Unlike most birds, woodpeckers have four toes-two pointing forward, and two pointing backward. The toes are sharp, and the special front- and-back design allows them to hold on tightly as they bang their heads against trees. They also have a strong tail feather, which they use to keep their balance while they work. But how do woodpeckers avoid brain injuries when they spend so much time pounding their heads against tough tree bark? One of the most interesting things about woodpeckers is their tongue. It is very long-sometimes twice as long as the bird itself, and it has a sticky substance on its surface. When a woodpecker sticks its long tongue inside a tunnel in a tree, the insects stick to it. The best part of all, though, is that the woodpecker can wrap its long tongue around its brain case inside its head. Imagine that! Its tongue acts as a shock absorber to protect the bird's brain from injury. Each time the bird hits a tree with its head, its tongue acts like a pillow-soft and springy -to protect its brain from the blow. That's why a woodpecker can tap and peck all day long and not get a headache. It's just one example of the perfection of nature's design.