A nice crisp, cool autumn weekend … at long last! You guys have big plans? I have no idea if we do or not … the girls usually decide what we’ll do on a Saturday, and I’m just along for the ride, the bank card, and the driver. I can’t believe that October is already half over … seems like it only started yesterday!
A few days ago, a friend and I were having a conversation about whether birds have tongues, and if so, whether they have taste buds. Of course … a perfectly normal conversation! What? You don’t discuss such things? Anyway, naturally the question kept burning in my mind, keeping me awake far into the wee hours, and I simply had to satisfy my curiosity. Well … turns out they do have tongues, and this ferruginous hawk just had to prove the point!
Just as birds come in all different shapes, sizes and varieties, so do their tongues — long tongues, short tongues, spiky tongues, curly tongues, forked tongues, frayed tongues, brush-like tongues. Care to take a look at a few?
This rainbow lorikeet has a brush-like tongue
These hummingbirds have forked tongues that are rolled up inside their beaks until submerged in liquid, at which time they partly unfurl. As the hummingbird drinks, the forks of his tongue furl and unfurl, so it’s almost as if he is drinking through two straws.
Isn’t this guy pretty? He’s a purple honeycreeper (looks blue to me) and has a very long tongue, to enable him to drink nectar from flowers (or the hummingbird feeder you have on the back porch).
Woodpeckers also have very long tongues that are also sharp and spiky … the better to get the bugs out of the holes in trees! And here you thought they just liked waking you at 6:00 a.m. on a Saturday! This guy decided to take the easy way out, though, and drink from the hummingbird feeder.
While we’ve established that birds do have tongues, what they don’t have is teeth, so birds of prey, such as fish-eating birds, have tongues with little rear-facing hooks or spikes to prevent a captured fish from slipping away from them. Penguins have very spiky and partially keratinized tongues, meaning that parts of the tongue are made strong and stiff by keratin.
Gentoo penguin chick
Geese and ducks also have spiky tongues, as well as hairy tongues and tongues with hard flat surfaces that, from a distance, seem to resemble a human’s tongue. However, they are really nothing like our tongues, for they are covered with hairs and spikes that act like a sieve, allowing the bird to filter food particles from the water.
Canadian geese
Mallard duck
So, we’ve seen that birds have tongues, but do they have taste buds? Now, this whole conversation started because my friend’s budgie had stopped liking one food that he was once very fond of, and nearly gobbled another that he never used to like at all. Turns out that yes, birds do have taste buds, but not very many, and not on their tongues, but rather in their bills!
Taste buds in birds haven’t been the subject of much research, so not as much is known, but what is known is that birds have far fewer taste buds than we humans. Depending on the species, birds may have fewer than 50 or up to roughly 500 taste buds, while humans have 9,000-10,000 taste buds. Birds can taste sweet, sour and bitter flavors, and they learn which of those tastes are the most suitable and nutritious food sources. The sensitivity to different tastes varies by species, but most birds use other senses—sight and hearing most prominently—to locate the best foods.
And now you know more than you ever thought you wanted to know about birds’ mouths! Hope you enjoyed the pictures and the mini-lesson! Now go forth and have a fun & wonderful weekend, my friends!
For more fun reading about birds and their mouths, here are the sources I used:
Let’s talk about bird tongues (Research on Dark-eyed Juncos and why animals do what they do)
Bird Senses and How They Use Them (The Spruce)
How Do Birds Taste Their Food? (Audubon)
Katie, a seven-year-old border collie, escaped from a hotel room in July during a trip to Montana with owners Carole and Verne King. Though she’s a social and friendly dog, she’s also skittish and the couple believes the pup was scared by thunder and fled the My Place Hotel while they were out for dinner.
They searched the hotel grounds, calling for Katie until early morning. Nothing. The next day, King continued her search, putting up fliers, knocking on doors and posting on social media. In total, King thinks she put up about 500 flyers in the town and surrounding area. She and her husband also brought game cameras and night-vision goggles to their search.
The pair decided to take a walk in the neighborhood, scanning the area with binoculars. They encountered a couple walking and asked if they’d seen a runaway border collie. They hadn’t. But the man said he saw a black dog heading north. King gave the couple a flier and was about to continue on her way.
After taking Katie to a local emergency vet clinic to assess her condition, King learned that her pup had lost 12 pounds and was severely dehydrated and in starvation mode.
And then … as I was scrolling through looking at the pictures, I saw Tiger Lily looking over my shoulder with some strange look in her eye. She must have called to the rest in that way of silently communicating that they have, for within 30 seconds, I had Oliver in my lap, Boo atop my desk, Pandora on the arm of my chair, and Tiger on the back of my chair. I was scared, let me tell you. No, Izzy didn’t come out of hiding … actually, I think at that time she was in the kitchen taking advantage of a fresh bowl of kibble. 
I’ve got to admit that it is pretty cute. The ‘Haunted Mansion Cat Scratcher’ combines a cat’s favorite thing in the world – a cardboard box – with black and orange Halloween elements of a scary house riddled with cobwebs and ghosts. It comes with a two-floor design that includes a perch pad on top and features a scratcher floor on both levels for “endless entertainment”.
Sigh. I will be making a trip to Target tomorrow.
But it’s really …
A cake!!!
Pretty cool, yes?
Take a look …
Granted, these are all small things, likely only to save a few thousand bees, but hey! It’s a start, right?
Poor tree! That had to hurt. Apparently this guy didn’t much care for being in a cage …
Now, you might wonder what keeps the ravens in the tower grounds. Well, from the book by Boria Sax, City of Ravens: The Extraordinary History of London, the Tower and its Famous Ravens …
That captivity chafed, though, and George would not abide it. George figured out how to climb a fire escape, perch high up on a wall, and glide down safely. Finally, in 1981, he went AWOL. Apprehended at a pub, he was forced to return to duty at the Tower. But still, he could not uphold the standards demanded of his station. Five years after, the Tower announced:
And then there’s the tale of two ravens named James Crow and Edgar Sopper. James Crow, who was a much-loved and long-lived raven, had died. After noticing the commotion surrounding the other raven’s death, Edgar Sopper decided he could “play dead” in order to bring more attention to himself. His trick was so convincing that the ravenmaster fully believed that Edgar Sopper had died. When the ravenmaster picked up the “corpse”, Edgar bit the man’s finger and “flapped off croaking huge raven laughs”.
In addition to Muninn and Huggin, and eventually little George or Georgina, the other ravens at the Tower of London include females Erin, Poppy, and Merlina, and males Jubilee, Harris, Gripp, and Rocky. Jubilee was presented to the Queen to mark the Diamond Jubilee in 2012, and later released in the Tower, bringing the total number to eight.
Constable John Zhu responded, “after sensing something fishy,” Wellington police confirmed on their Facebook page. The penguins were described as “little and blue”.
The little blue penguins conservation status is considered to be “at risk” to “declining”.
I came across this on Bored Panda and thought it was pretty cool …
“They did us no further injury than the taking most of our hats from us, having got drunk the night before, as they told us, and toss’d theirs overboard.”
It’s a hidden cat box enclosures from a company called Merry Products:
And … I know that Jolly Monday and Saturday Surprise are supposed to be entirely free of politics, but … well, I just couldn’t resist this one …
