How to Successfully Smash Your Face Against a Tree

In my third year of reporting on the coronavirus pandemic, I find woodpeckers, which can ram their heads against hard surfaces about 20 times a second, to be incredibly relatable. But the birds’ extraordinary behavior raises an obvious question: Why, as one team of scientists wrote in 1976, is the countryside “not littered with dazed and dying woodpeckers”?

The is that woodpecker skulls have adaptations, such as spongy bone in the front of their skulls, that absorb or dissipate the shocks from their pecks, protecting their squishy brains. This explanation features in books, news articles, zoo displays, and scientific papers. “You can’t avoid it,” Sam Van Wassenbergh, a biologist at the University of Antwerp, . There’s just one problem: As Van Wassenbergh and his colleagues , woodpecker heads don’t absorb shocks at all.