What Is The Best Fuel For Birds

With their ability to fly, birds have many advantages over earthbound animals

. But flying takes a lot of energy, or fuel. It gets this fuel by eating. Much as gasoline is fuel to a jet airplane, food is fuel to a bird.

But, unlike earthbound creatures, birds that fly have to be finicky about the foods that they eat. The food can't be too bulky or it would add unwanted weight to their bodies and hinder their flight. The best foods for a bird is something that is small but yet dense in nutrients. And that food is seeds.

Among the most nutritious and nutritionally dense foods available to birds are seeds. As a matter of fact, most seeds are so filled with nutrients, that a lot of birds will eat only seeds as long as they are available. If seeds are sparse, then many might switch to secondary sources of foods such as insect, fruits, and the like. And these food sources, while valuable, don't pack the condensed energy value of seeds.

During the millions of years that birds and plants have coexisted on the planet, many plants have seen their seeds consumed by billions of birds for their nutrition needs. And they have continually developed defenses to thwart them. One type of defense has been to develop a hard shell around the seed which cannot be breached without tremendous efforts. In response, some of the birds that feed on these seeds have developed extraordinary strong beaks with the capacity to exert hundreds of pounds onto a shell that easily crack it.

Other plants have taken an alternative approach. They have evolved with spiny needles around their shells which prick anyone who attempts to extract the seed from within. In response to this, many birds developed special slender beaks that enable it to avoid the spines and reach the seed inside.

Over the centuries, other plants have changed the flavor of their seeds so that they have extremely unpleasant tastes to dissuade birds from wanting to eat them. Unfortunately, most birds have a very limited number of taste buds in their tongue, so the taste doesn't really bother them that much.

Meanwhile, over the years, other plants have developed seeds that contain poisons. In response, certain birds have learned to ingest foods which neutralize the poisons along with the poisonous seeds. This way they remain unaffected.

For millions of years the end result of this has been the nearly continuous state of war as plant life evolves defenses to protect their seeds from birds and birds evolve to counteract the most recent plant defense. This, in large part, accounts for the huge number of beak styles that you will see within various bird species.

In fact, a lot of veteran birders are often capable of telling a lot from a bird, even if they are unfamiliar with it, by simply looking carefully at the shape and structure of its beak.

What Is The Best Fuel For Birds

By: Ken Lawless

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