Finches of the Galapagos Islands

During his time on the Galapagos Islands, Charles Darwin studied 3 main types of ground, seed-eating finch. He noticed that each had a beak that was the right shape and size for the type of food on its island.

We thought this was amazing and we carried out our own investigation into why the beak sizes were different.

We used different sized tweezers and tongs to represent each beak size and to see how easy it was to pick up the different sized seeds. We quickly understood why the beaks of the finches had adapted to the size of the food available to them, and we were even able to identify which finch lived on which island.