If you’re a morning lark rather than a night owl, then the chances are you’ll have been up at sparrow’s fart. This rather odd expression supposedly came about because those hours before dawn are quiet enough to hear a bird fart.
But has anyone ever heard a bird fart early in the morning? Or indeed at any other time of the day?
The question we need to ask is can birds fart at all?
To answer it we must first define a fart. Although not an accepted medical term, farting is commonly used to describe flatulence, which is the passing of gas from the digestive system through the anus.
For humans and mammals, farts happen mainly due to digestion. Microbes found in our guts help break down food and produce gasses such as oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide or methane as by-products of bacterial fermentation. Diets rich in fibrous plant matter such as beans, grains, fruit, and vegetables can increase the production of gas which is why animals such as horses and elephants fart more than the average human.
Many birds are frugivorous or granivorous meaning they eat a primarily plant-based diet. Birds also have similar digestive systems to mammals, and they have anuses so in theory they should be able to fart. However, so far there is no concrete evidence to show that they do.
Only twice, has anyone in the scientific community ever come close to observing what might have been a bird fart.
In 1965, Alan Richard Weisbrod, a student at Cornell University who was working on his master’s thesis “The Maintenance Activities of the Blue Jay, Cyanocitta cristata”, wrote the following:
An interesting phenomenon was observed on two cold days during December of 1963. These observations were made shortly after noon while I was looking through the window of the office into the flight in which captive jays are kept. Several birds were perched directly overhead and in front of me, at distances varying from one to one and a quarter meters. One of the birds in front of me defecated. A small puff of whitish gas was expelled along with the feces. The feces dropped from the bird while the gas wafted below and parallel to the slightly raised tail, until it dissipated rapidly into the cold air. The gas could be clearly seen against the dark-colored eave that hangs over the sheltered perches, upon which the birds were fluffed and resting. Several days later a bird perched in the same position was observed to defecate with the accompanying wisp of whitish gas.
However, despite acknowledging that the bird could hypothetically have farted, he quickly dismissed it as something much more mundane:
It is common knowledge that mammals flatulate and that some food items seem to increase the frequency and volume of gas-expulsion from the lower intestines. Since birds feed on many of the same types of foods as mammals and their digestive metabolism is basically similar, there seems to be no theoretical reason why birds cannot also flatulate, but flatulence has never been reported in birds to my knowledge. In all probability, the observed whitish gas was mostly warm water vapor which was released as the bird defecated in the cold still air. Whether this gas was the product of the digestive processes or was simply condensation of moisture from the feces could not be determined.
Another bird with a rumoured propensity for parping is the Bassian thrush, also known as the olive-tailed thrush. It is found in Australia and Tasmania residing in shrubs, forests, and rainforests.
For years it was thought that the worm-eating thrush uses its farts to help it find prey. Some sources claim the noise startles the worms so they begin to move in the ground making it easy for the bird to spot them. Others say that the resulting puff of gas blows leaf litter away revealing any worms that were hiding underneath.
However, some internet-sleuthing by an Australian blogger found that there is no evidence that Bassian thrushes fart when foraging.
The rumour seemingly started due to a passage in a paper published in 1983 that describes the Bassian thrush dipping its vent and shivering accompanied by a noise similar to a jet of air while foraging for worms. There was no suggestion that the birds were farting to dislodge worms, although the author did suggest that the bird may have been engaging in something called cloacal popping where air is sucked in and pushed out of the cloaca.
Some species of snake use cloacal popping as a defensive strategy. The pops which sound very much like human farts, only slightly higher in pitch, can be heard from up to 2 m away, but aren’t real farts in the true sense of the word as they aren’t produced by air expelled from the digestive tract.
But apart from the Bassian thrush observed in 1983 there is no other evidence that birds use cloacal popping either to help them forage or to scare away predators. So what was this bird up to?
Dr Dani Rabaiotti, an environmental scientist at the Zoological Society of London, and author of Does It Fart? an authoritative guide to animal flatulence, suggested that the poor ‘farting’ thrush may simply have been feeling unwell.
Some owners of parrots claim that their pet birds fart. But although parrots can emit fart-like sounds they’re actually mimicking them from the other end, a bit like blowing a raspberry.
There are a couple of theories that explain why birds don’t fart despite possessing all the plumbing to do so. One suggests that they have such a fast rate of digestion that food doesn’t spend long enough in their short intestinal tracts to ferment and produce gas. Birds poo about once every 10 minutes and can even do so when they’re asleep. Any gas that is produced is expelled as they poo and doesn’t come out as a separate fart.
Another says that their guts lack the same kinds of gas-producing bacteria that helps digest food as farting animals so they don’t end up with air in their guts that they need to get rid of.
Of course, it’s possible that birds to fart but they do it so slowly, quietly, and subtly that ornithologists may have missed them.
3 Responses
I’ve seen pigeons stadning on my garden fence farting. He was there for a good 10 mins making awful noises and each time his body would do a little shudder. So funny to watch, but i’ve definately seen a bird farting.
I had a pet pigeon when I was a child. When she would lay eggs, she would have the most smelly farts for a couple days after. Maybe it’s not “technically a fart”, but very smelly gas is a thing.
Thank you for providing a little bit of insight to one of the worlds most asked questions. I will keep an ear out for any ornithological flatulence. Thank you again, and god be with on our flight in search of flatulence.