25 Feb 2014 2:39 PM
In the second of a short series of blogs, the RSPB’s Tony Whitehead describes why the Somerset Levels are a special place, and why the RSPB wants them to thrive for both wildlife and people.
The snipe is an improbable looking bird. It’s a small creature, with beautifully cryptic brown markings. And a disproportionately long bill. A bill that evolution has fine tuned over millennia to do one thing – to search out small creepy crawlies deep in the soft damp earth.
Its length is however just one feature of a design that is way more subtle. Naturally, if you’re probing around in the soil you can’t see what lies beneath. For this reason the tip of the bill is pitted with clusters of nerves, making it hyper sensitive to the slightest movement. That’s good, but the next problem to overcome is, simply, how do you open your bill to swallow something if it’s stuck in the ground? To prise the whole length open would take quite some effort. But the snipe has an elegant solution. Instead of prising it open fully, the bird has the ability to open just the tip of its bill (which, for Scrabble fans, is called rhynchokinesis). Clever things these snipe.
No comments:
Post a Comment