Original air date: 4 November 1998
Above is a graphical timeline of the episode, below is a more detailed text version of the same
Selected material:
Birds have beaks fitting for the tasks they need
Green finch delicately removing the outer shell from a seed, using the tongue. The whole sequence can be seen at (2’20-2’35).
Crossbill opening a seed that is not meant to be opened
Crossbill is the only finch that can move the upper and lower bill in opposite directions (3’44-3’45) !!!
Inside the flower (25’20)
The dark thing lying along the stem of the plant is actually a tongue of a hummingbird licking inside a tube of a flower. How did they manage to film it, cutting it open etc ?
A finch digging for grub (34’15)
Using a spine from a nearby cactus (in the Galapagos)
Coming up: “But there are some birds that literally live on mammals – alive or dead. They eat them; and those are the birds we’ll be looking at in the next programme in this series.”