Richard Collins: Sweet nectar - how does alcohol affect a bird's behaviour?

You may have heard stories about drunk elephants and tipsy monkeys, but researchers have studied how hummingbirds respond to alcohol in their nectar

An Anna's hummingbird extracting nectar from a flower. Picture: iStock

African elephants, it’s said, get drunk occasionally. They love the aromatic fruit of the marula tree. This falls to the ground and ferments. According to local lore, eating it they become intoxicated. But is this a pisheóg, a yarn invented to impress gullible tourists?

Researchers, investigating the claim in 2006, found that elephants take marula plums directly from the branch, but won’t eat fruit rotting on the ground. In any case, body-mass calculations show that 1,400 fruits, yielding about 27 litres of juice, would be required to make the average elephant even slightly tipsy. According to Steve Morris of Bristol University, a participant in the study, pachyderm drunkenness is a myth, a travellers’ tale. "People just want to believe in drunken elephants," he told National Geographic.