Amy Edmunds, age 8, of Halifax, Virginia, for her question:
Why does a woodpecker peck wood?
Most birds like to get up early and find a breakfast snack at sunrise. When you camp in the woods, you can hear them rustling around before dawn and many of them are ready, to welcome the morning sun with a song. But one of them may sound a loud hammer like noise that wakes you up with a jerk.
The woodpecker seems to use his beak as a hammer to beat beat beat on a tree. He can beat so fast that his bobbing head looks like a blur. And the sound of his rat tat tat echoes through the woods like a rolling drum. The noisy racket can be heard even when the gaily dressed fellow is too far away to be seen.
The busy basher loves to peck wood, fast and furiously. But he does not always do it for the same reason. Sometimes he chisels a hole in the tree trunk to make a home for himself and his family. That bill of his is very sharp and strong and in a short while he digs a hole maybe six inches, maybe 10 inches, deep. It is shaped like a gourd with a narrow neck and a wide, round bottom.
The woodpecker has a harsh, raspy voice. When something scares or startles him, he lets out a sharp scream or maybe yells a high note that sounds like "Peent, peent." Sometimes the handsome bird wants to sing to his sweetheart but he does not use his untuneful voice for love songs. He finds a hollow log and pecks away like a beating drum.
When you hear him in the woods, he may be digging a home or beating out a song to his lady love. But most of the time, the woodpecker pecks wood because he is hungry. No, he does not eat chips of wood and he does not dine on the bark of the tree. His f avorite foods are bugs and grubs. He pecks away to find the ants and other insects that live in and under the bark of trees.
When he finds a bug or a grub, he shoots out his long, strong tongue and scoops it into his mouth. The tip of his amazing tongue is hard and often edged with tiny spikes to spear his victims. It is also a sticky tongue and ants that escape the spikes as a rule get trapped in the sticky goo.
You would think that the fast, bushing blows would jar his neck or at least give the woodpecker a terrible headache. But his neck has extra strong, thick muscles. And he has a thick plate of sturdy bone in his head to protect his skull from his noisy rat tat tatting.
Mrs. Woodpecker lays four, five or six white eggs in the hollow nest. Most birds are very good mothers, but she is not. When the woodpecker chicks hatch, she goes off and leaves the child care to her husband. The new chicks are helpless and quite bare. But they have loud, piercing voices and when they are hungry they yell out with noisy shrieks. The papa bird is kept busy from dawn to dusk bringing them food and later teaching them all the tricks that proper woodpeckers should know.