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Great Spotted Woodpecker — printable fact sheet
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Great Spotted Woodpecker
Dendrocopos major
A woodpecker strikes wood at speeds that would concuss almost anything else, thousands of times a day. The intuitive explanation is shock absorption, but recent work suggests the opposite: the skull behaves less like a crumple zone and more like a stiff hammer, and the bird gets…
Did you know?
- The Great Spotted Woodpecker can drum up to 10-16 times per second, producing a sound that can be heard over long distances.
- Its tongue is so long that it wraps back over the skull, anchoring near the nostril when not in use. Much of its drumming is communication, not feeding — which is why it hammers metal gutters, where there is nothing to eat, because they carry further. Two toes point forward and two back, and it props on a stiff tail to form a tripod. It survives the impacts largely because its head is so small and light that the forces never reach damaging levels.
What I learned
Draw the great spotted woodpecker
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