A bird beak is the most important resource it has, and every species has one solely designed for survival. Birds use beaks for just about everything: building nests, feeding their young ...

Under these drastically changing conditions, the struggle to survive favored the larger birds with deep, strong beaks for opening the hard seeds. Smaller finches with less-powerful beaks perished.

For example, the cactus finch has a long beak that reaches into blossoms, the ground finch has a short beak adapted for eating seeds buried under the soil, and the tree finch has a parrot-shaped ...

With my PhD project at the Functional Morphology Lab of the University of Antwerp, I aim to understand how songbirds use their beaks to feed on seeds. How do they remove the husk of a seed without ...