How Birds Work: Bills

Bird use their bills for everything from feeding to grooming to nest building to courtship displays and tool handling. In this talk we’ll look at the remarkable array of sizes and shapes of bird bills and then examine in more detail four examples: the chisel-like bills of woodpeckers that peck into trees; the bills and tongues of hummingbirds that draw nectar from flowers; sandpiper bills that can detect food beneath sand on a beach without touching it; and phalarope bills that draw water up into their mouths by a ratcheting motion.

Contact

Professor Lorna Gibson, ljgibson@mit.edu