WOODY KNOWS THE DRILL

WHY don’t woodpeckers (right) get headaches? The answer is that, unlike a human brain, the bird’s brain sits firmly in its skull so that it doesn’t bounce back and forth when its beak is delivering staccato blows to a tree. Despite this, most woodpeckers still prefer to drill nest-holes in dead trees, as rotting wood is easier to penetrate. But the black woodpecker prefers to set up home in healthy trees, relying on willing labourers to do the hard work for them. A mating pair will start by hacking out an entrance in a tree’s outer growth rings and then sit back. In their absence, fungi continue the job. There are multitudes of their spores in every cubic metre of air and mere minutes after the first blow of the beak, they land on the damaged site. Eating the wood alive, they eventually turn it soft and mushy so that the woodpecker couple can return to building their home without getting sore heads.