peck at something

Examples of pecking

pecking

In English, many past and present participles of verbs can be used as adjectives. Some of these examples may show the adjective use.

Would the organism generalize the pecking behavior in response to a purple key?
The pecking order of free radicals and antioxidants: lipid peroxidation, a-tocopherol and ascorbate.
It also confirmed the new pecking order within the revolutionary alliance.
However, they continue to discriminate, as shown by pecking at control beads of other colours.
For them there is a pecking order in terms of materials from those that are decent and novel to those that are secondary and poor.
He claimed that it was the central factor that determined the international pecking order.
The other birds get the water, and ever since then the woodpecker has been pecking at things.
That is, a pecking order exists that sets the agenda and ultimately determines the direction the guideline is going.
Pigeons' pecking is a behavioral lineage that transcends the lifetime of individual pigeons.
Pairings of the keylight with food resulted in the pigeons approaching and pecking the key light rather than going to the food hopper to eat.
We have used two approaches to identify the cellular sequelae of pecking the bitter bead.
At an earlier time the pigeon begins a pattern of behavior, such as rapidly pecking a fixed number of times on a lit button.
The pens were checked daily and wheat grain was scattered on the ground inside the pen to encourage pecking and scratching in the soil.
Probably made in this household, the metate required only minimal shaping by pecking from its shape collected from the river nearby.
Virtually all of the research cited above has used pigeons as subjects, pecking at a lighted key as the response, and food as the reinforcer.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.