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Clearly, the FAA is not acting in a
responsible manner.
The IC campus has numerous ornamental cherry trees, some very
close to the center of campus and in locations with heavy human
traffic. Cedar Waxwing flocks, occasionally as large as several
hundred, eat the berries on these trees in late fall and on spring
return in early spring. If you squeeze the berries, they sure do
smell like an alcoholic fruit drink. Without any scientific
evidence, I've always assumed that it was fermented.
Supporting the fermentation possibility is that
1. The birds eating the fermented berries can be absurdly tame,
allowing nearly a hundred students to walk by with 2 to 15 m as
class changes.
2. A great many of the birds kill themselves against the nearby
plate glass windows, far more than I would expect if they weren't
flying while under the influence. I suppose I have seen at least
20 dead below windows.
3. Even more convincing, I have seen an additional 10-20 lying
dead beneath the trees. I never thought of alcohol poisoning,
which now seems possible. In several instances the birds had
berries half swallowed in their throat or in the gap of their
mouth. I thought they got drunk and then suffocated themselves.
Keven mentioned the major selective pressure against eating
fermented berries and drunken behavior. Similarly, there have been
fatal consequences among students on our campuses due to drinking
in the last several years, yet students do continue to get smashed
(a quite appropriate word). I guess that for waxwings, the choice
at some time and place may be starvation or drunkenness.
John
On 3/6/2014 12:56 PM, Weinberg, Kathy C. wrote:
Besides, the FAA will not allow the
birds to fly with elevated blood alcohol levels.
Kathy C. Weinberg
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I am just speculating, but my thoughts
are:
* The drying process would preserve the fruit because the
yeasts might be unable to function without water (I
surmise), just as the bacteria cannot function with low
water and high sugar concentrations (my understanding of
why drying preserves fruit).
* Any alcohol in the fruit would be as apt to evaporate as
the water, or maybe more so, ethanol boiling at a lower
temperature than water.
* The birds would need water to reconstitute and digest
the concentrated fruit. When I eat very dry food, my
stomach hurts unless I also drink water, I think because
the dried food draws too much water from my stomach. Water
is needed for digestion generally to break up many larger
molecules, although oxidation later on also creates water
which I assume can be used for this. Birds don't carry
around extra water. I often see waxwings drinking, and I
think that's why.
* I'm skeptical that birds who rely on old fruit have
issues with inebriation. Birds are so finely tuned for
flying that the drunks wouldn't survive, either hitting
something or getting eaten. The selection pressure would
be enormous. I think either there isn't much alcohol out
there, or they know how to avoid it.
* Cedar Waxwings are a bit quirky and different from other
birds, which might be misinterpreted as tipsy.
* A big difference between the dried fruit we eat, such as
raisins, and the fruit birds eat is that we dry ours
quickly and then keep it dry, stored out of the weather,
whereas fruit on trees is exposed to precipitation, and
wild fluctuations in temperature and humidity. It's a
really good question what actually goes on inside a fruit
hanging on a tree for several months. I bet it's very
different depending on the size of the fruit (full-sized
apples v crabapples v buckthorn & nannyberry). The
skin of the fruit must play a huge role, too, in shedding
and repelling water, and keeping out microorganisms.
On Mar 06, 2014, at 11:40 AM, "W. Larry Hymes" <[email protected]>
wrote:
I recently wrote about cedar
waxwings consuming snow, while at the time
they were eating the dried fruit of Korean Ash. I
raised the question
whether they were perhaps doing this to dilute the
alcohol in the
fruit. Kevin expressed the opinion that there
would be no juice,
fermented or otherwise, in the fruit. He then
asked, if I had ever
gotten drunk eating raisins. The answer to that is
no, particularly
since raisins are _not_ made from overripe fruit.
As to his statement
about no juice being in dried fruit, there is some
water content in
raisins (up to 15%), although, of course, that is
controlled in the
drying process. If there were no moisture at all
in raisins, it would
be like eating hardtack! I would hazard to guess
that there is some
residual water, albeit very little, in naturally
dried fruit.
As I understand, alcohol is produced as fruit
becomes over ripe. As
moisture leaves the fruit, the alcohol will become
more concentrated,
with the highest concentration occurring during
the winter months. The
alcohol may help to preserve the fruit. I recall
reading a post to
Cayuga Birds long ago about someone observing
unusual behavior in robins
that had become tipsy from eating overripe fruit.
Since cedar waxwings
feed exclusively(?) on fruit, I could imagine that
they could be more
susceptible to becoming inebriated, if they were
to consume fruit that
has alcohol concentrated in it. This can be
dangerous for the birds,
since it makes them more susceptible to predation,
and if they were to
consume enough of it, they could die. All this
made me wonder whether
waxwings could have developed an adaptation for
consuming water when
eating overripe fruit in order to dilute their
"drink". Kevin may well
be right that the birds coincidentally were very
thirsty at the same
time they were consuming the fruit. By the way, I
have no idea what
the alcohol content might be in dried, overripe
fruit of Korean Ash. I
have not bothered to do a taste test! Does anyone
know someone who
might be willing to run an analysis?
Larry
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