"Huainan woodpecker is as big as a crow, and the top is like a crane pile of dansha."
Many times, we see some woodpeckers, climbing on upright trunks, constantly tapping the trunks with their long hard, pointed beaks...
Woodpeckers actually usually refer to a common name for birds of the woodpecker family, Shi Zhen yue: This bird cuts the tree to feed on beetles, hence the name. Their extraordinarily large feature is that "the mouth is as strong as a chisel, and the tongue is long and retractable". Shi Zhen said: "Woodpeckers are as small as finches, large ones are like crows, faces are like peach blossoms, beaks and feet are blue, and claws are sharp and sharp." The mouth is like a cone, several inches long. The tongue is longer than that, and its end is pricked, and it pecks at the beetle, and it is eaten by the tongue hook."
The size of different species of woodpeckers varies greatly, ranging from more than ten centimeters to more than forty centimeters. For example, the velvet woodpecker is about 15 cm long, and the North American black woodpecker is about 47 cm long. Woodpeckers are widely distributed and can be found in all but Oceania and Antarctica. The widely distributed species in China are green woodpecker and spotted woodpecker, and the white-bellied black woodpecker in Sichuan, Yunnan, Fujian and other places in China is a national second-level protected animal.
From a scientific point of view, are woodpeckers beneficial or harmful?
As we all know, the woodpecker is a famous forest bird. They feed on pests such as celestial cows, giddings, transfiguration moths, and bugs, and can eat about 1500 per day. Due to the large amount of woodpecker food and wide range of activities, in the 13.3 hectares of forest, if a pair of woodpeckers inhabit, more than 90% of the gidding insects can be pecked in one winter. In addition to eliminating pests under the bark of trees such as tianniu larvae, the traces of their chiseled wood can be used as an indicator of forest hygienic logging.
The pests that woodpeckers eat are mainly larvae of tianniu, larvae of cysts, weevils, pseudo-step beetles, golden turtle beetles, borer moths, bugs, tick eggs, ants and so on. Some pests lurk deep in the trees and bite the trees alive. Only woodpeckers can pluck it out of the trunk and get rid of it. Because the staple food of woodpeckers is pests, which is very beneficial to prevent forest pests and develop forestry, everyone calls them "forest doctors".
Since woodpeckers are beneficial birds of the forest, how do they cut trees and prey on forest pests?
We know that many forest pests are often hidden under the bark, especially small cysts, tianniu larvae, grubs, termites, etc., and even drill into the xylem, and it is difficult to work with artificial control. However, the forest guardian woodpecker has a superb ability to catch insects.
The woodpecker's beak is straight and pointed, not only can peck the bark, but also can peck the hard wooden part, much like a woodworking chisel, its tongue is slender and soft, can extend the outside of the mouth long, and there is a pair of very long tongue horn bones, around the outside of the skull, play a special spring role, the varicose of the hyoid bone horn, can make the tongue stretch freely, the tip of the tongue is keratinized, there are rows of barb hooks and mucus, very suitable for hooking insects and larvae on the trunk.
Every morning, they began to tap the trunk with their mouths, making a sound of "tuk, tuk..." in the silent forest, if they found insects somewhere in the trunk, they climbed tightly on the tree, their heads and mouths were almost perpendicular to the trunk, and the mouth was like a chisel, first pecking the bark, chiseling out the hole, directly into the nest in the wood, sticking out the pest with a long tongue like an earthworm, eating it one by one, and sticking out the eggs with mucus. Some woodpeckers, the tip of the tongue and a thin hook, are sticky and pinched, so that the worms can not escape.
If the nest passage is curved or the wormhole is so deep that the woodpecker's long tongue cannot reach it, it will skillfully use the "drumming to repel insects" trick, tapping at the passage with its mouth, making a peculiar drumming sound that makes the pests fearful, so that the pests are stimulated by sound waves, dizzy, wandering around, often trying to escape from the hole, and happen to be eaten by the woodpeckers waiting here.
According to the survey, woodpeckers can make 500 to 600 woodpecker sounds a day, and the speed of each peck reaches 555 cm/s, while the head shakes faster, 580 cm/s. They usually have to completely destroy the entire tree of cystics before moving to another tree, and when they encounter a tree with severe insect pests, they will work on this tree for several days until all the pests are removed.