(Some woodpeckers, too, have very long tongues—sometimes more than three times the length of the bill—demanding an equally odd storage arrangement when the organ is not in use prying insects from deep holes. In the case of the hairy woodpecker, the tongue forks in the throat, goes below the base of the jaws, wraps behind and then over the top of the woodpecker’s skull, and comes to rest inside the bony orbit behind the eyeball.) With this extraordinary appendage, a hummer can drink its own weight in nectar in a single visit to a feeder.
