Hooked Beak Snags Flowers

a dark blue flowerpiercer stands on a broken trunk against an out of focus light green background

Biological Strategy

Chestnut-bellied flowerpiercer

AskNature Team

Image: Andy Morffew / Flickr / CC BY - Creative Commons Attribution alone

Attach Temporarily

Living systems must sometimes, temporarily, stay in one place, climb or otherwise move around, or hold things together. This entails attaching temporarily with the ability to release, which minimizes energy and material use. Some living systems repeatedly attach, detach, and reattach for an extended time, such as over their lifetimes. Despite being temporary, these attachments must withstand physical and other forces until they have achieved their purpose. Therefore, living systems have adapted attachment mechanisms optimized for the amount of time or number of times they must be used. An example is the gecko, which climbs walls by attaching its toes for less than a second. Other examples include insects that attach their eggs to a leaf until they hatch, and insects whose wings temporarily attach during flight but separate after landing.

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Birds

Class Aves (“bird”): Eagles, hawks, sparrows, parrots

Birds are evolutionary engineering marvels. They are descended from dinosaurs, but are far from our idea of heavy, scaly reptiles. Of the specific adaptions that set them apart, most notable is flight—although some mammals can fly, birds take the prize for abundance in the skies. Many birds have hollow, lightweight skeletons and specially-designed wings to help them stay aloft. They also have feathers made of keratin that help them stay warm, attract mates, and improve navigation and aerodynamics in flight. In contrast to their dinosaur ancestors, they lack true teeth and have replaced them with specialized beaks and bills.

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The beak of the flowerpiercer bird is used to snag and steady nectar-filled flowers with a hook on the top half of the beak.

“It is called, accurately enough, a flower-piercer. The upper half of its beak is notched along its edge and hooked at the end. The lower half is rather shorter and very sharply pointed. The bird lands on or beside a tubular flower and snags it with its hook. Holding the flower steady in this way, it then stabs it with the lower part of its beak and flicks its tongue inside to steal the honey.” (Attenborough 1995:119)

Last Updated August 18, 2016

References

Book

The Private Life of Plants

BBC Books | 21/08/1995 | David Attenborough

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