But what about the marbles.
To the different birds of marbles beak shape disappeared.
Bird beaks have adapted for many things such as eating defense feeding young gathering and building nests preening scratching courting and attacking.
Obviously the straw is going to be the best way to drink nectar like hummingbirds.
The beak or bill is an important structure of birds that is used for various purpose like eating preening lifting killing prey fighting probing for food courtship or feeding the young.
Generalists who use different techniques to obtain food whose beaks do not have specific shapes.
Generally bird beaks are categorised according to their shape and the function.
Each bird has a different beak type spoonbill tweezerbeak tongbeak etc and you will find that depending on the food available some will do better than others in each environment.
The fun of the bird beak experiment.
And specialists whose beaks are adapted for a single function.
In this lab we will simulate a scramble competition kind of like in the old kids game hungry hungry hippos between six species of birds in six different environments.
For example cardinals have heavy thick bills used to crack seeds and humming birds have thin bills to sip.
The size and shape of a beak is specific for the type of food the bird gathers.
I laid out the different food types in bowls and the kids had to figure out the best type of beak to eat each food.
Some are very obvious.
Give each group use a different type of beak.
Although beak shapes vary in size and shape from species to species all beaks are composed of two jaws known as the upper mandible or maxilla and lower.
In the activity find the best beak students experiment with long pointy beaks that are great for picking up seeds and wide flat beaks that are good for scooping.
There are two types of birds.
Organize students into groups and supply each group with beaks tweezers dissection probe pliers tongs spoon or straws and a cup.
Want to learn even more about birds or birding.
This activity is binder clip 24 inch designed to illustrate darwin s spoon brilliant deduction about the small tweezers shape of bird beaks and natural paper clips selection.
Because this really is a fun project.
In this mystery students carry out an investigation to determine the relationship between the shape of different bird beaks and the food each bird eats.