Woodpecker

For science this year, we are studying birds,
using an amazing book called Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day.
So we've been keeping an eye out for visitors to our backyard,
like bluejays... we discovered they love corn. On Tuesday,
we enjoyed watching this woodpecker for about 15 minutes,
as he lunched in our cherry tree.Dr. Gary Parker explains some fascinating things
about woodpeckers in one of his articles:

The woodpecker is a marvel of interdependent parts or “compound traits”—traits that depend on one another for any to have functional value. When a woodpecker slams its head into a tree, the deceleration experienced is many times gravity. The nerve and muscle coordination must produce a dead-on hit; a slip to one side or the other could virtually wrench the cover off the brain! The eyelids snap shut when the beak strikes its target. Some scientists say that’s to keep wood chips out of the eyes; others say it’s to keep the eyeballs from popping out of their sockets! Both may be right!

For such drilling, a woodpecker obviously needs a tough bill, heavy-duty skull, and shock-absorbing tissue between the two. But if the woodpecker were put together by time and chance, without any planning ahead, which part came first? Suppose, just by chance, a baby bird is born with a tough bill. It decides to try it out. WHACK! It throws its head into a tree. The bill is just fine, but it squishes in the front of its face. One dead bird, end of evolutionary story!

But maybe I got it backwards. Maybe, just by chance, a baby bird was born with a heavy-duty skull. WHACK! It throws its head into a tree. This time its skull is okay, but its bill folds up like an accordion. There’s no evolutionary future in that either!

In fact, neither the tough bill nor the heavy-duty skull would have any functional survival value until both occurred together—along with the shock-absorbing tissue, nerve and muscle coordination, etc.! That’s no problem if the woodpecker were put together by plan, purpose, and a special act of creation. We expect drilling tools created by people to have interdependent parts that must all be completely assembled before the machine works. That’s just good sense, and good science. We would surely expect no less from the perfect devices created by God!

And there’s more. Since death entered the world, some woodpeckers are doing more than just drilling holes to store acorns. They’re looking for bark beetles. The beetles hear all this pounding, of course, so they just crawl further down their tunnels. To reach the beetles, the woodpecker needs more than just drilling tools; it needs a long, sticky tongue.

But if a bird gets a long, sticky tongue just by chance, what’s it going to do with it? Dangling out of the bill, the tongue gets bit or even stepped on. As the bird is flying over a twig, the tongue could wrap around the twig and hang the hapless “pre-woodpecker.” The answer for the woodpecker is to slip its tongue into a muscular sheath that wraps around the skull under the scalp and inserts into the right nostril! That makes good sense (and good science) if you’re planning ahead, but poses real problems if your faith is in time and chance, trial and error. (You don’t get another trial if the error is fatal!)

And today, the kids enjoyed the first real snowfall!