Sculpin

I’ve been in a crafty mood, and I was idly thinking about making some birdseed ornaments. This came as a surprise to me:

“Birds have no salivary glands,” said Lee Amigh, an environmental educator at Lancaster County Central Park. That explains why birds can choke on peanut butter, said Amigh, who prefers to mix the bird seed with cornmeal (for traction) or with lard (it’s slippery.) With birds peanut butter is a real danger.” — a Gardenweb forum comment

I don’t know the original source of that. Now, some birds definitely do have salivary glands. (Consider birds-nest soup; the nests in question are made of hardened bird drool.) But I’d be willing to accept that most backyard-feeder birds have less productive salivary glands than we do. The Key to North American Birds says, “These structures… vary extremely in their development. [...] In most birds, however, the salivary glands are small, simple, and and less distinct from other mucous crypts that open into the mouth.”

That’s enough to make me reconsider the old trick of coating a pinecone in peanut butter and rolling it in birdseed. It’s not like there’s any shortage of substitutes; suet, lard, and maybe coconut oil are looking better to me.

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