And in short-term periods of extreme temperatures, having a big beak can be a liability. Hot air from the environment will actually move into the beak, causing the bird to heat up too much ...

American white pelican has a large, heavy beak that's yellow-orange in color. Besides catching fish, pelicans use their bills to get rid of excess salt ...

Smaller finches with less-powerful beaks perished. So the birds that were the winners in the game of natural selection lived to reproduce. The big-beaked finches just happened to be the ones ...

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“normal” beaks (examples shown of a petrel and a gull) and a bird with a tactile bill-tip organ (a tinamou, close relative of ostriches and emus and which has an ancestral bill-tip organ ...

How fast does the beak move? To answer these questions, I’m recording high-speed X-ray videos of the feeding birds. Interestingly, I discovered some fascinating differences in beak movement ...