Do woodpeckers get headaches?

I’m not an ornithologist, but I play one on the internet. And I’m curious. As I stand (lately, freezing), waiting for a bird to come just a little bit closer, I wonder things.

1.      Can birds freeze to death? Come to think of it, that’s probably projection.

2. Why are owls afraid of me when I’m clearly terrified of them and their face-grabbing talons?

 3. And a big one I’ve often returned to — why don’t I find dead woodpeckers all the time, expired from the head trauma they inflict upon themselves just to get a meal?

So I went to university; got my degree in ornithology; partnered with scientists from around the world…

Just kidding. I googled “do woodpeckers get headaches?” The answer may surprise you. We don’t know… because woodpeckers can’t talk to us, and are not able to grasp the Advil bottle with their claws tightly enough to open it. But it’s unlikely they suffer too much from all that wood pecking and head banging they do.

Because, in laypersons’ terms, woodpeckers wear helmets. In fact, they wear one of the most sophisticated and scientifically complex helmets ever devised. Their helmet… starts at their tongue, and is an integral part of their skull structure. Attached to a woodpecker’s impressively long tongue (great for nabbing insects deep in bark, I imagine) is a bone called the hyoid.

Illustration of a woodpecker skull, hyoid bone, and tongue, courtesy Wikimedia

Now, if you’re anything like me, you hear hyoid and you go immediately to CSI and other murdery television shows. In humans, the hyoid bone is in the throat, and is almost always broken in instances of manual strangulation. So, the CSI rule is “if the hyoid is broked, the victim was choked.”

Woodpecker hyoids also originate around the throat and attach to the tongue, but then they wrap around the skull in an elegant, curving v-shape, and act a bit like a shock-absorber for that delicate little brain that knows where all the good bugs are.

According to a couple of scientific papers I’ve been reading (I’m not JUST a Googler, you know; I actually do the reading), there is still no consensus on how exactly woodpeckers avoid brain trauma. Almost certainly the hyoid helmet helps, but the beak shape, and it’s attachments to the rest of the body probably help as well. If the lower beak takes most of the impact, the stress is likely transferred down the neck to the rest of the body, also sparing the brain.

Downy woodpecker on a suet ball in front of Gerry and Pauline’s house.

My buddies Pauline and Gerry up here in Northern Ontario hang balls of suet and seed from the tree out front of their house. Their visitors are mostly woodpeckers of all size and type. Must be a nice break for a woodpecker to grab a meal without having to clear away a mass of bark first. Gerry and Pauline are the real heroes of this story.

Further reading:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0026490

https://askabiologist.asu.edu/plosable/woodpeckers

https://letstalkscience.ca/educational-resources/stem-in-context/do-woodpeckers-get-concussions

The Birds!

I am fortunate to live in two places that attract birds by the treeful. South Etobicoke, on Lake Ontario’s north shore just west of downtown Toronto, and Thessalon, a narrow finger of land jutting down into Lake Huron’s northern channel an hour southeast of Sault Ste. Marie and little more than a stone’s throw from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. That both these spots happen to sit hard by a Great Lake undoubtedly contributes to the wealth of feathers surrounding me. The Great Lakes are inland, freshwater seas, and probably a daunting challenge for migrators. So stopping by the shore on one’s way either north or south is established custom. Many birds pass through Etobicoke and Thessalon, while some have made these places their home.

Thessalon waters are frozen thick between December and March, which means most aquatic birds head south from there. And that’s why when I think of a Thessalon bird, it is most often the overwintering common raven and the elusive, majestic bald eagle. But spring sees the return of many ducks and waders, and in better weather local feeders attract everything from blue jays and woodpeckers to ruby-throated hummingbirds.

A pair of mute swans feed in a calm inlet on a snowy January morning.

Etobicoke’s shores can get mighty icy themselves, but it’s rare for the lake there to go utterly solid for any length of time. That means the mute and trumpeter swans that can so shock and please casual walkers are year-round residents, along with a collection of American black ducks, mallards, scaup, goldeneye, long-tail, mergansers, and other diving ducks. And, of course, the Canada geese. Always, always, the Canada geese. All the shots in this posting are from Etobicoke.

I have wandered the trails and pathways of Colonel Samuel Smith Park for close to twenty years, first just to get out of the condo with the kids when they were toddlers and I was a desperate single father looking for distractions, and now on a weekly duty to walk my dog Birdy in her absolute favourite place in the world. Birdy knows when it’s the weekend, and she paws at me to get out of bed and head to the lake. She wants her wild smells of coyote, raccoon, and beaver, and she craves a drink out of that still wild, unbearably cold lake. She likes the bits of Tim Hortons bagel and cream cheese she can weasel from me as well after the walk.

A fuzzy-bottomed American robin overwinters on Lake Ontario’s north shore.

On these weekly walks, I have observed the many (many) birdwatchers that frequent Samuel Smith. Camo clothing, binoculars, long-lens cameras, and a barely-disguised disdain for all recreational dog-walkers. These folks seem to have secret knowledge of migratory patterns, know each other, and show up in numbers whenever a rare sighting hits the grapevine. I have always known I would one day join their cult. Now that I have, I don’t think they’re going to like me as a member. I have a good camera, and a long lens, but I still bring my dog.

Today, my wife Julia and I walked Birdy down at the park, me with a new long lens, and Birdy intrigued by the occasional murdery evidence of predator activity. We happened upon a couple young boys nudging a duck’s head with their shoes on one of the jutting points of the park. A couple week’s back, I’d spotted a Cooper’s hawk in the park, but this kill looked a bit more coyote-like. On the other hand, why would a coyote leave a perfectly delicious head?

A long-tail duck in flight at Colonel Samuel Smith park in Etobicoke.

The answer came on our walk back to the car. Spotting my lens, a couple approached and asked if we’d seen “the owl.” Apparently, a snowy owl had been spotted, and the birders were out in numbers to get their photos. Would a snowy owl take a duck, and leave its head? Oh yeah.

As I’ve said to friends, my white whale in this birding adventure I’ve taken up is the bald eagle of Thessalon’s Lighthouse Point. I am a cold-water swimmer, and frequent that northern peninsula from May to November. So many times as I swim, I track an eagle above me. I wonder if s/he’s tracking me.

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Important: This is NOT a bird.