North Macedonia

A bee-eater’s beak gets shorter from digging in sand.

The bird is one of Europe’s most vividly coloured species, turquoise, yellow and rust-brown, yet it builds no nest in the usual sense. Using its beak and feet, it digs a tunnel straight into a vertical sand bank, often more than a metre long, moving around 13 kilograms of sand for a single nest.

The digging wears the beak down enough for it to become measurably shorter. Over the following weeks, it grows back.

Bee-eaters often nest together, so a single sand wall can become riddled with long tunnels side by side.

In North Macedonia, colonies occur along the Vardar Valley.