Beak Meets Seed
How do different birds extract the meat from the shell?
© Tim Lindenbaum / El Porco
Birds like finches, chickadees and this Northern Cardinal love sunflower seeds, but each species uses a different strategy to extract the meat. When a finch plucks a sunflower seed from the feeder, it uses its tongue to maneuver the seed lengthwise into a groove on its beak. As it closes its beak, a slight back and forth action slices open the hull, and a small sideways movement husks the seed, while the tongue may help extract the kernel. But chickadees lack the heavy duty, seed-slicing beak of a finch. Instead, they hammer and chip the hull open with the tip of the bill to extract the goods.
BirdNote®
Beak Meets Sunflower Seed
Beak Meets Sunflower Seed
Written by Bob Sundstrom
This is BirdNote.
[Northern Cardinal song, http://macaulaylibrary.org/audio/176244, 0.06-.10.]
Birds like finches and cardinals love sunflower seeds, which they take into their stout, triangular beaks one after the other. In the blink of an eye, they extract the nutritious contents, and they do it so fast, it looks like a magician’s sleight of hand. But if we magnify the process and slow it down, we can see how it works.
First, if we look inside a finch’s beak, we see a groove that runs the length of the beak on the cutting edge of the upper half. The lower half of the beak slides into it perfectly.
When a finch plucks a sunflower seed from the feeder, its uses its tongue to maneuver the seed lengthwise into that groove. As it closes its beak, a slight back and forth action slices open the hull, and a small sideways movement husks the seed, while the tongue may help extract the kernel. Now it’s quickly on to the next seed: maneuver, slice, husk and extract, swallow.
Chickadees lack the heavy duty, seed-slicing beak of a finch. [Black-capped Chickadee call, http://macaulaylibrary.org/audio/98802, 0.06-.09] But they still partake of countless sunflower seeds. A chickadee takes one sunflower seed at a time from the feeder, flies to a nearby perch where it can hold the seed atop a branch, then hammers and chips the hull open with the tip of the bill to extract the goods.
For BirdNote, I'm Michael Stein.
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Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Northern Cardinal recorded by G. A. Keller.
BirdNote's theme music was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
Producer: John Kessler
Executive Producer: Dominic Black
© 2016 Tune In to Nature.org February 2015/2018/2019 Narrator: Michael Stein
ID# bill-04-2015-02-15bill-04
Bob Sundstrom
Writer
Michael Stein
NarratorSights & Sounds
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This blog is the first in a series about the ways that members of the BirdNote comm