Right now outside of my window there is a loud drilling sound occurring over and over. It’s fast, it’s powerful and it’s repetitive. It’s a woodpecker. Now, I’m not going to go all technical on you, but this woodpecker’s drill is fast, too. He’s not messing around as he destroys the fascia board on my house. And he does all of his precision drilling without any tools. He merely uses his maximum durability beak, his built-in shock absorber system, and his claws, which furnish him some super stability.
Just consider with me the extreme headache you would get if you hit your head just once against a tree—hard enough to penetrate the tree’s bark. That would be worse than your worst-ever migraine and you would find some medication pretty quickly. Yet my friend outside my window has already hit his cranium against my house and various trees out there hundreds of times this morning. David Juhasz says this about his amazing shock absorber system:
The forces involved in the woodpecker’s hammering away at trees are incredible, for the suddenness with which the head is brought to a halt during each peck results in a stress equivalent to 1,000 times the force of gravity. This is more than 250 times the force to which an astronaut is subjected in a rocket during liftoff…. In most birds, the bones of the beak are joined to the bones of the cranium—the part of the skull that surrounds the brain. But in the woodpecker the cranium and beak are separated by a sponge-like tissue that takes the shock each time the bird strikes its beak against a tree. The woodpecker’s shock-absorber is so good that scientists say it is far better than any that humans have invented.
Colley, Caleb (2009), “The Jackhammer in Your Backyard,” [On-line] URL:http//www.apologeticspress.org/APContent.aspx?category=9&article=2315
Juhasz, David (2001), “The Incredible Woodpecker,” [On-line], URL: http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v18/i1/woodpecker.asp.