Functions
Birds may bite or stab with their beaks to defend themselves. Some species use their beaks in displays of various sorts. As part of his courtship, for example, the male Garganey touches his beak to the blue speculum feathers on his wings in a fake preening display, and the male Mandarin Duck does the same with his orange sail feathers. A number of species use a gaping, open beak in their fear and/or threat displays. Some augment the display by hissing or breathing heavily, while others clap their beaks.
Read more about this topic: Beak
Famous quotes containing the word functions:
“Adolescents, for all their self-involvement, are emerging from the self-centeredness of childhood. Their perception of other people has more depth. They are better equipped at appreciating others’ reasons for action, or the basis of others’ emotions. But this maturity functions in a piecemeal fashion. They show more understanding of their friends, but not of their teachers.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)
“Those things which now most engage the attention of men, as politics and the daily routine, are, it is true, vital functions of human society, but should be unconsciously performed, like the corresponding functions of the physical body.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When Western people train the mind, the focus is generally on the left hemisphere of the cortex, which is the portion of the brain that is concerned with words and numbers. We enhance the logical, bounded, linear functions of the mind. In the East, exercises of this sort are for the purpose of getting in tune with the unconscious—to get rid of boundaries, not to create them.”
—Edward T. Hall (b. 1914)