woodpecker brain Archives - DOES GOD EXIST? TODAY

Woodpeckers can hammer 25 strokes while their heads travel more than 20 feet per second. If you banged your head into a tree for a few seconds, the results would be headaches, detached retinas, concussions, eye damage from flying wood chips, and massive skin damage. With all the talk about brain damage from football collisions, perhaps we can learn from the woodpecker design.

Many design features protect woodpecker brains. Their skulls are thick and heavily ossified to prevent shattering. Shock-absorbing tissue between the eyes and around the skull acts as a crash helmet. Spongy material separates the skull and bill. A sac of fluid surrounds human brains, but a tough membrane surrounds a woodpecker’s brain to prevent it from bouncing around. The woodpecker brain is tiny, weighing a fraction of an ounce, so it has much less inertia.

Woodpecker eyes are held tightly in place by bone and surrounding tissue to prevent damage. A membrane blinks over the eye to keep out wood chips. The nostrils are covered with fine bristly feathers or are narrow slits to protect the bird’s air chambers. Woodpeckers have long tongues that reach deep inside tree openings to capture insects. The tongue wraps around inside the skull, further protecting the brain when the bird is hammering on the tree. The woodpecker’s bill is solid and shaped like a chisel. Thick and strong neck muscles absorb the kinetic energy.

Woodpeckers are essential to forest ecosystems. They control worms and insects that can infect trees, avoiding blight and infections. Medical personnel dealing with head trauma have much to learn from the woodpecker design. Design features requiring so many specialized features are difficult to explain by chance. A step-by-step evolutionary process can’t explain the production of the many unique features. God’s creatures are designed to do specific jobs, and “We can know there is a God through the things He has made” (Romans 1:20).

References: Audubon Magazine for Jan/Feb 1999, page 104, and National Geographic “Wildlife.”

How Can a Woodpecker’s Brain Survive the Hammering? - Pileated Woodpecker — Pileated Woodpecker

We live in Michigan with massive numbers of trees all around, allowing us to watch various wildlife. The design that allows our woods to survive involves many animals that plant seeds, prune plants, and control insect populations. One of the leading players in the control of insects is our Michigan woodpeckers. That raises the question, “How can a woodpecker’s brain survive the hammering?”

We have a variety of woodpeckers, but the most interesting to me are the pileated woodpeckers and flickers. These birds not only peck at trees removing insects that could damage the plants, but they also use their pecking to mark territories. One woodpecker hammers on the flashing of the chimney that vents our furnace. The sound is so loud that it wakes me up in the morning. But it also sends a territorial message to all other woodpeckers in the area.

The frequency of the hammering of woodpeckers is around 20 hits a second. Their heads move so fast it is hard to see the motion with the naked eye, and even a photograph at a high shutter speed shows only a blur of the woodpecker’s head. So, the big question is, “How can a woodpecker’s brain survive the hammering?”

The textbooks say that a spongy bone in the woodpecker’s skull acts as a shock absorber to protect the brain. However, recent research has shown that isn’t the case. Not only does a dissection of the woodpecker’s head not show any such bone structure, but high-speed video of three different species of woodpeckers shows that the bird’s brain decelerates at the same rate as the beak. There is no cushion for the bird’s brain.

So that does not answer the question, “How can a woodpecker’s brain survive the hammering?” The answer seems to be in the design of the bird’s brain, not in the area that surrounds the brain. Dr. Sam Van Wassenbergh at the University of Antwerp says that the woodpecker’s brain is so small and of such light-weight construction that the pecking does not generate enough pressure to damage it.

The problem with that explanation is that the woodpecker has the same functions as all other birds and does not show symptoms of a deficient brain. We also know from human studies that brain size is not directly related to intelligence. The design of a woodpecker’s brain to enable it to hammer on trees and other objects (such as chimney flashing) is an example of engineering design. Scientists need to do more research to fully understand the design God put into these birds and perhaps learn what practical applications it might have for us.

Reference: The Week for August 5, 2022, page 21.

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Learn from the Woodpecker Design

How Can a Woodpecker’s Brain Survive the Hammering?