Okay, so, birds eating fermented berries to get drunk on purpose is some Snapple Facts nonsense that we’ve been hearing since 2002. Unlike a lot of those so-called Real Facts, this one is actually true. Who would have thought the apparatus used to keep mass produced tea properly pasteurized would be so unreliable?
Anyway, for the unaware, here’s a video of some bohemian waxwings getting shitty off of fermented berries:
However, these passerines aren’t the only avians getting fucking lit, tho.
If you’ve watched Hitchcock’s The Birds you probably noticed there are a lot of shots of birds just sitting there. It’s hard to get large groups of birds to just chill out for a while. At least, I would imagine. Ray Berwick, the famous Hollywood bird trainer, came up with a solution: get the birds drunk.
The dozens of gulls and crows on set were fed a combination of wheat and whiskey to keep them from flying away. Kind of takes the suspense out of the movie knowing that they were all just a bunch of drunk ass birds. After filming was complete, the little alcoholics were too dangerous to be set free and no one was allowed to take them home as a pet. I have not been able to find out what actually did happen to them after their fifteen minutes.
Christopher Olson, a researcher at Oregon Health and Science University was studying finches. One 2014 morning, Olson and his colleagues, “Just showed up… and mixed 6% alcohol, and put it in their water bottles and put it in the cages.”
With a blood alcohol level of .08, the finches got day drunk enough to get DUI’s. As it turns out, drunk finches slur their songs the same way that drunk humans slur their speech. The next step in the research is to find out if getting birds drunk affects the way they learn new songs. That study has yet to come out, but, you know, the answer is probably.
Anyway, here’s an NPR story about it. In it, they slow down drunk finch songs to the speed of nightmares. Enjoy!