A woodpecker may not make a good football mascot, but Mississippi State University researchers think this bird’s shock-absorbing beak may help them design a better football helmet. Lakiesha Williams, ...

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, cleaning ...

The highest rate of beak abnormalities ever recorded in wild bird populations has been detected in Alaska and the Northwest, according to a new study. "The prevalence of these strange deformities is ...

Researchers in Anchorage are working to crack a tough nut in the form of a beak deformity affecting a large portion of black-capped chickadees and other birds in parts of Alaska, including the Kenai ...

Look at a bird’s beak to see what family the bird belongs to and the kind of food it eats. Seeing a bird with a long, needlelike beak would tell us it’s in the hummingbird family that probes flowers ...

ANCHORAGE, Alaska --Biologist Colleen Handel saw her first black-capped chickadee with the heartrending disorder in 1998. The tiny birds showed up at birdfeeders in Alaska’s largest city with ...

As Charles Darwin showed nearly 150 years ago, bird beaks are exquisitely adapted to the birds' feeding strategy. A team of mathematicians and engineers has now explained exactly how some shorebirds ...

This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated. Scientists already knew that birds evolved ...

Birds with larger bills spend more time hiding their noses from the cold. You know what they say about the birds and their beaks—the bigger they are, the harder they snuggle. Research published ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. GrrlScientist writes about evolution, ecology, behavior and health. I ran across a sweet little paper in Science recently that ...