Dave,

Many, perhaps all, sandpipers have touch-sensitive bills. You can actually see tiny sensory pits along the bill tip, and under them are Herbst corpuscles, which furnish that sensitivity. Look up "sandpiper sense of touch" online. Presumably this sense functions only when a potential prey item moves or when it is clearly distinct from the substrate. These pits are very prominent on the bills of birds such as dowitchers and snipes, quite evident in the skeleton when the rhamphotheca is removed, but I don't recall seeing them on godwit bills. It should be easy to find them by looking at study skins (in lieu of a live or dead bird in the hand), and maybe someone who has access to specimens (because of Covid-19, I can't go to the Slater Museum) can check this.

Dennis Paulson
Seattle


> On Oct 4, 2020, at 9:37 AM, dgrainger at birdsbydave.com wrote:

>

> Over the last few weeks I have watched and photographed Marbled Godwits working the sandy edge of Quimper Bay / Port Townsend, probing with their long recurved bills, plunging into the wet sand at water's edge. What I am curious about, having seen them come up with food fairly frequently.

>

> My question is: how do these feeders sense that they have located something edible? I thought that it could be touch, feeling a different density of an object, or perhaps even taste or smell.

>

> Those Godwits were quick about their repeated probing plunges, jamming those bills several inches into the sand just as the receding water kept the spot wettest. Quimper Bay is usually very calm water: the edge where I was watching had just little ripples reaching shore. Time was on rising tide, about 3/4 in.

>

> I asked the Near Universe, Dr Google, but found nothing about it. Anybody out there that can educate me?

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