Hard Knocks: Lessons from the woodpecker

I’ve thought about this stuff a lot as I listen to the northern flicker woodpecker tapping noisily away on the rain gutter outside my bedroom window. And not just rain gutters of course. 

Woodpeckers will peck at a tree up to 12,000 times a day and just one woodpecker peck produces about 15 times the force needed to give a human a concussion. So, how do woodpeckers bang their heads so much, and so hard and not come away with brain damage? 

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