Biomechanics of bird feet

Birds and their feet, which are surprisingly diverse in form and function. Photos by Dave Furseth.

Wherever the wind takes us, from Northern California to the Falkland islands and several places in between, including labs from Brown University to CSU San Marcos.

The diversity of bird toes and tendons has been the focus of classic morphology research for over a century, but we are just beginning to understand the hidden complexity of their form and function. Please see Sustaita et al. (2013) and Backus et al. (2015).

Most of our work on grasping performance has been conducted on raptors (e.g., Sustaita & Hertel 2010). However, other species, such as the shrike pictured above, also take advantage of strong grip forces for handling prey and other purposes. 

We are using XROMM (X-ray Reconstruction of Moving Morphology) to obtain detailed measurements of toe joint motion and tendon function in cadaveric Emu feet to understand how digital flexor forces are transmitted to the toes.

We perform dissections to measure muscles (e.g., Sustaita 2008) and static and dynamic biomechanical modeling (e.g., Backus et al. 2015; Colwell et al. 2023) to understand the functional consequences of morphological variation among taxa.