My neighborhood is beset by Redwinged Blackbirds. They’re usually polite enough, except for mating/nesting season when the males get all territorial and will swoop at you.
Around late summer I get groups of them eating berries from my shrubs, staggering and flopping around. They really look like they’re drunk.
Debate among my friends has ranged from the berries bieng narcotic, to the berries get naturally fermented by the warm weather (I’ve tried smelling them for alcohol, but didn’t smell any)…
Any Ideas?
Incidently, these bushes are really common in California. Thorny, with clusters of red skinned berries with yellow “meat” inside (haven’t a clue what the name is).
"Martha Bentley, the “bird expert” quoted in the story, explained to me the latest hypothesis, that the birds were killed by natural toxins in the berries, and not by fermented berries. Then she volunteered that there is plenty of evidence that frozen-and-thawed-and-then-fermented pyracantha berries really can (and do) get birds drunk.
She said that pyracantha used to be planted in the median strips of many California highways, but CDOT took it out after too many birds ate the fermented berries, got drunk, took off and weren’t able to reach a safe altitude before veering out into traffic."
Also…
"The farmer had spread grape pumice (mash from wine grapes) on his fields as a fertilizer. Normally, the winter rains in Sonoma County are enough to break down the grape pumice and wash it into the soil, but the winter of 1990 had weird weather like this winter does, and there was no rain. So the grapes didn’t decompose, but fermented instead.
No, the hawks didn’t eat the grapes. Starlings did. Lots and lots of them. The starlings got good and drunk and stupefied. Many died, and the ones that didn’t die couldn’t fly very well. They were all easy pickings for these two patrolling hawks, who made a Christmas feast of starling, marinated au Pinot Noir. And like little boys who eat too many brandied cherries at Christmastime, the hawks also got falling-down drunk."
There are lots of other reports in the science literature about birds and other animals getting drunk on fermented wild fruits.
Just because you can’t smell any alcohol in the berries doesn’t mean that there isn’t any. Birds have a tremendously faster and hotter metabolism than homo sapiens, plus they’re physically smaller. A 6 oz. bird would be affected by miniscule amounts of alcohol that a 150 lb. human being wouldn’t even be able to taste.
There are other things that affect birds that don’t bother people. If you overheat a Teflon pan, the fumes just smell bad to you, but if you have a parakeet, they’re totally toxic to him. This is one of the first things you learn about parakeets–don’t keep them near the kitchen. True fact, not an UL.
And of course, miners used to take canaries down into the mines with them. The birds were much more sensitive to the poisonous and explosive gases that are sometimes found in mines, and if the miners looked over and saw the bird flat on its back on the bottom of the cage, they made like hockey players and got the puck out of there.