Hot dinner date with the birds

FOR a long time I’ve suspected birds have a totally different sense of taste to people or other mammals.

I keep hens and their diet is augmented by kitchen scraps and garden left-overs. I also grow some pretty vicious chillies in my greenhouse and the hens love them. But if a small piece of chilli ended up in the dog’s bowl he wouldn’t speak to me for a week.

My suspicion was confirmed the other day when I came across an obscure piece of scientific research confirming that birds are immune to the burning effect of capsaicin, the chemical that makes chillies hot. The degree of hotness is measured in Scoville Units.

This might seem like a mildly interesting but quite useless piece of information. But, from time to time, I am contacted by readers who have a problem with small mammals robbing stuff from their bird feeders. The mammals in question are usually rats, though mice have been mentioned and while some people seem to enjoy watching grey squirrels visit the feeders, others resent it. Apparently mixing some hot chilli powder with the bird food will repel the rodents and make no difference to the birds. I have to say I haven’t tried this but it sounds like a good theory.

I watched an interesting piece of behaviour at my own bird table the other day. A young house sparrow landed on it, rather clumsily. It was fully fledged but noticeably smaller and drabber than an adult and it was having some difficulty with the flight business. The wings were going at a ferocious rate and seemed to be only capable of flying in straight lines, corners had yet to be mastered.

Anyway, after the landing it started to feed enthusiastically on some small seeds. Almost immediately an adult female, which I assumed was its mother, arrived with something that looked like a small earthworm in her beak. She hopped up to the youngster and insisted it sit up with its beak open while she shoved the worm down its throat.

The young bird then went back to picking at the seeds but this seemed to really annoy the adult. She kept interrupting it and insisting it assume its ‘please-feed-me’ posture so that she could shove the seeds down its gape.

It tried to avoid its mother, even to the extent of using its unreliable wings to fly to the nearest bush and then trying to sneak back to the bird table when she wasn’t looking. But she was too clever and whenever she approached him a powerful instinct made him crane his neck backwards and open wide.

Sparrows and humans may have very different reactions to chilli but some have remarkably similar ones to the growing independence of their offspring.