I'm Flora Lichten, and you're listening to Science Friday.

Today in the show, how do you drill a hole with your head?

They're engaging everything from head and neck muscles, which you might expect,

all the way down to muscles in their tail and hips.

If you have heard the hammering of a woodpecker in the woods,

you may have wondered, how do they do it?

What does it take to whack your head against a tree repeatedly,

hard enough to drill a hole?

Well, a team of researchers wondered that, too, and set out

to investigate by putting tiny muscle monitors on eight downy woodpeckers and watching them

with high-speed video as they pecked away in the lab. Joining me now is one of those researchers,

Dr. Nick Antenson, he's an NSF postdoctoral research fellow at Brown University and an author of a report on the work in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

Nick, welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you, Flora.

Okay, I love this question, but why this question?

Yeah, so what we were really excited about with this question in particular is, you know, all birds peck, but woodpeckers

are really special in that they take this to the extreme. And by investigating extreme behaviors,

we can kind of figure out what the performance limits are of what things like muscles are actually

able to do.

When you say that woodpeckers take it to the extreme, how hard do woodpeckers peck?

A woodpecker can peck at about 20 to 30 times their body weight.

What it feels like, if you get pecked by one, as it feels like a sharp pinprick. That's actually

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