This is bird node.

Birds like finches and cardinals love sunflower seeds, which they take into their stout triangular beaks one after the other. In the blink of an eye, they extract

the nutritious contents, and they do it so fast it looks like a magician's sleight of hand.

But if we magnify the process and slow it down, we can see how it works.

First, if we look inside a finch's beak, we see a groove that runs the length of the beak on the cutting edge of the upper half.

The lower half of the beak slides into it perfectly.

When a finch plucks a sunflower seed from the feeder, it uses its tongue to maneuver the seed lengthwise into that groove.

As it closes its beak, a slight back and forth action slices open the hull, and a small sideways movement husks the seed,

while the tongue may help extract the kernel.

Now it's quickly onto the next seed.

Maneuver, slice, huskin extract, swallow.

Chickadees lack the heavy-duty seed-slicing beak of a finch,

but they still partake of countless sunflower seeds.

A chickadee takes one sunflower seed at a time from the feeder,

flies to a nearby perch where it can hold the seed atop a branch,

then hammers and chips the hall open with the tip of the bill to extract

the goods. In that amount of time, a hungry finch might easily open and consume half a dozen seeds.

For Bird Note, I'm Michael Stein.