Do Animals Get Drunk?
N ot long ago, residents of Gilbert, a small town in Minnesota, began calling the cops on a peculiar neighborhood nuisance. Cedar waxwings, wonderfully colored little birds, were “flying into windows, cars, and acting confused,” local law enforcement reported. The disturbance made headlines in places like NPR: “Minnesota Residents Call Police On Rowdy Drunk Birds.”
What was going on? Apparently, an unseasonable frost had caused the berries the waxwings feed on to ferment earlier than usual, and as a result, the police stated, some were getting a “little more ‘tipsy’ than normal.” The waxwings were at it again a few years later, in Texas, prompting the Houston Chronicle to run the headline, “Cedar waxwings are the drunken revelers of the bird world.” Rachel Richter, an urban wildlife biologist with the Texas Department of Parks and Wildlife, told a local news outlet, “Sometimes [the waxwings] tend to overindulge a little bit, which can get them intoxicated.”
In a 2012 paper in the Journal of Ornithology, Hailu Kinde, a veterinary microbiologist at the University of California, Davis, and his colleagues, conducted necropsies on several flocks of waxwings that were found dead after flying into windows, fences, and other obstacles. Their examinations “revealed that all birds had engorged themselves with over-ripe berries of the Brazilian Pepper Tree,” the authors wrote. They saw that the birds’ livers, which contained intoxicating levels of ethanol, had ruptured. “The cause of death in these birds,” Kinde and his colleagues wrote, “was trauma that resulted from colliding with hard objects when flying under the influence of ethanol.” One could make the argument that fruit trees near highways are responsible for a lot of animal-related car accidents.
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