9 Responses to “Stop it, birds, your necks are stupid”

1. ncmncm Says:

   
   January 13, 2026 at 9:57 pm

   Osteology aside, the ability to control their necks independently at each joint so as to snake their heads to exactly where they want them is what impresses me. When I try to imagine designing a control system to achieve this, with muscles at each point choosing whether or which way to move, it seems impossible. The problem might be simplified if they were to adjust one joint at a time, in sequence running from shoulder to cranium, with maybe sometimes a series of adjacent joints all making what amounts to the same adjustment, and maybe sometimes reversing part of the sequence before resuming on a different track. But I don’t think their motion is so limited.

   I think a flamingo can raise or lower its head smoothly along a vertical path, with a U-bend rolling the length of the neck. In that case it seems like there is not just a desired end point, but a chosen path followed at a chosen rate.
2. Brad Lichtenstein Says:

   
   January 14, 2026 at 12:51 am

   Too bad your favorite reptiles tended to ossify these tendons…
3. Brad Lichtenstein Says:

   
   January 14, 2026 at 1:10 am

   SVPOW comment

   As for ncm: yes, but there’s a trained neural network running that show. No different than how you personally cannot consciously dictate a priori how much force your calf will exert during a particular step you take. YouTube served me a short yesterday of a humanoid robot doing a backflip. It didn’t stick the landing cleanly, and the resulting flopping to stay upright was much less humanoid than the flip itself: that jerkiness is what you would expect from a top-down calculated system. Flamingo needn’t even be born able to do any of these things, it just has to flop the head around a bit as a hatchling, to get used to the dynamics. 

   And each joint is not independent: tugging on one vertebra’s tendon will tend to apply pressure to nearby tendons. An interesting complex system to be sure!
4. Ira McIntosh Says:

   
   January 14, 2026 at 5:07 pm

   “I wonder whether different individuals have different handedness”

   Even though “handedness” seems an odd term for a class of creatures without hands, I suppose it does a good job of indicating a physiological directional preference. If I heard someone from the southern United States refer to the “neckedness” of a bird, I might imagine that the bird had a lack of feathers.

   Then again, sometimes I hear about humans being “left wing” or “right wing”. I do love the creative vagaries of the English language.
5. Mike Taylor Says:

   
   January 14, 2026 at 5:09 pm

   I agree that “handedness” feels a bit off, but “chirality” would be worse!

   And yes, if ever the left wing/right wing distinction made sense, it doesn’t any more.
6. Matt Wedel Says:

   
   January 14, 2026 at 7:56 pm

   Loads of interesting stuff here. The point about the control system for the neck is valid — it’s hypothesized that different clades of birds use different stereotyped neck motions precisely to avoid calculation overload. See a relevant figure from van der Leeuw et al. (2001) and discussion inthis post.

   Handedness is extremely interesting to me. I think even flatworms show some evidence of it, and it seems to be the default for vertebrates. Animals that have a sideways component to the bite, like crocs grabbing fish, tend to show handedness in their strike direction.
7. LeeB Says:

   
   January 15, 2026 at 8:32 am

   I have seen a Galah (Parrot) that walks across a cage on his perch and spins his head around before walking back in the other direction; when he walks the other direction on the perch he never spins his head before turning back.

   I don’t of course know if he has some damage to his neck vertebrae that requires this or if it is just a weird habit he has developed.

   The owner of the Galah got him from a pet shop as an adult after he had been returned by his original owner because he sometimes bites; he also has a permanent bald spot in his feathers.

   So he is a bit of a weird bird; his diet was originally very narrow but he has learned over time to eat a wider range of things; and he never tries to mimic human speech.
8. Jerry D. Harris Says:

   
   January 26, 2026 at 3:54 pm

   Huh, I just noticed that the neck of the flamingo in the center of the first picture is bent at some pretty marked angles, in a hexagonal pattern (on the left side and top of the loop). The necks in the other photos don’t seem to do that, but that could be the distance and/or angle of the photos, too. I am not sure what those angles mean, but mentally I can see them as disarticulations…!
9. nathanparker11 Says:

   
   January 26, 2026 at 8:07 pm

   I work at a zoo that has Caribbean, greater, and Chilean flamingos. The Caribbean and greater species typically show the obvious bony joints when the neck is flexed, as in the first pic (I believe those are both Caribbeans).

   The Chileans do not, as in the birds in the third pic (I dn’t know which species those are, but they have similar build to Chileans). I think this is just because Chileans and other small flamingos have a thicker envelope of soft tissue and/or feathers around their necks than the taller species have.

   The second pic is also of Caribbeans but the joints are not obvious here; it looks to me like the bird has its feathers fluffed up a bit, concealing the characteristic form.

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