How Do They Do It?

[Dov Henis]

( ...hoping that this subject belongs here...)

 

One of the forty fruit trees I grow in my yard is a macadamia.

 

In November-December I collect fruit, peel off the green outer husk, then dry and crack the shells to get the tasty kernells.

 

And every year I find, with wonder, several nuts with shells either pin-holed by a amall under-the-husk worm that eats the kernell, or with bird-pecked gaping hole through which the bird ate the kernell leaving the inside of the shell shiny clean.

 

I wonder again and again:

 

(1) How does the small worm pin-hole the macadamia shell?

 

(2) Most of the bird-gaped shells are on the ground. But some of those kernell-cleaned shells are on the tree, dangling at the bottom of their 7-inch "umbilical" stalk without any near-by branch for the bird to stand on. How, by Newton's name, do the birds do it?

 

Would be grateful to learn,

 

Dov