Ibis use their long bills for probing the ground or mud.
If the 770-pound lander touches down safely after its 10-month journey, it will spend three months or longer probing the ground and monitoring the weather above.
These can detect not just footsteps ten metres or so either side of a buried cable, but also a low-flying drone passing overhead, vandals damaging a railway line, a terrorist burying a bomb beside a roadway or someone probing the ground trying to find a pipeline from which to steal oil.
The de-miner must check every alarm by probing the ground gingerly with the stick.
Research partners are also looking at using this technique to help in probing the ground for oil or other mineral deposits.
This can be done by probing the ground with a long object to feel the tunnels below.
Among other findings, the researchers report online in the journal Science that two crows fashioned tools from dried grass stems, a previously unknown tool, and used them to probe the ground, perhaps searching for ants.
The full-potential linear augmented plane-wave method (FP-LAPW) has been exercised to probe the ground state properties such as lattice parameter, bulk modulus, and its pressure derivative, elastic constant and structural stability of the compound SrS, SrSe, and SrTe, respectively [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12].
They use their bills to probe the ground or turn over clods of earth or small rocks looking for food.
If you have to move forward for some reason, or you can't see your tracks to backtrack, you'll need to probe the ground for mines and move forward little by little.
What I couldn't see before: a black grouse standing motionless on the wall that separates field and moorland, a bold dark silhouette against straw-coloured grass; a pair of oystercatchers probing the boggy ground with orange beaks; white smoke rising from a farmhouse chimney.
