Hi, my name is Steve, and I take care of birds for a living.
A big part of that is cleaning up their droppings.
Have you ever wondered why bird droppings are white?
I looked into it, and it reveals some interesting things about their internal structure and
lifestyle.
So let's take a look at bird droppings!
This video is brought to you by the Rainbow of Birds Ebook.
More on that later.
In humans, protein is digested, used, and then processed before excretion.
When proteins are broken down there is waste ammonia inside your cells.
Waste ammonia in your cells is exactly as bad as you would think it is, so your body
quickly does a chemical reaction to turn it into urea, which is less toxic.
Urea then leaves the body in urine.
In birds, there is one additional step.
The liver takes in urea and spends energy turning it into uric acid.
Uric acid then is excreted by the kidneys.
Uric acid is a semisolid, white paste.
There are your white bird droppings.
And you can appreciate them on public art everywhere!
If, for some reason, you looked closer at bird droppings, you would also see a clear
portion, which is waste water, and a darker portion, which is digested food.
They all come out at the same time from the same opening, the cloaca.
Why do birds spend extra energy making uric acid, when they could just make urea the way
that we do?
There are two huge advantages.
One of them is that uric acid is a paste, so it requires less water to excrete.
Nice!
But also, birds spend part of their lives sealed inside a container.
We call these containers eggs.
It turns out that uric acid is much less toxic at high concentrations, so being sealed in
an egg with uric acid is less of a problem than being sealed in with urea or ammonia.
Other vertebrate animals like reptiles also lay eggs.
And guess what they do with their protein waste?
They make it into uric acid.
And a distant branch on the family tree, egg-laying mammals like duck-billed platypus and echidnas
also produce uric acid.
Even most insects produce uric acid.
And it's all because of eggs.
I've had a lot of time to think about bird waste because it takes up a good half of my
working life.
There's a popular superstition that it's good luck to have bird droppings fall on you.
And I believe this is true!
Because after bird droppings fall on you, the next thing that happens will always be better.
Anyway, next time you have bird dropping fall on your car, at least you'll know some interesting
facts about them.
By the way, here's how to remove bird droppings.
Pour or spray some water on it.
Let it sit for a minute or two.
Uric acid absorbs just enough water to turn back into a paste, then you can remove it
easily.
Just wipe it off.
Now you too are a bird waste expert!
If, after this video, you would like to learn some of the more beautiful aspects of birds,
be sure to check out the Rainbow of Birds Ebook.
I put it together so that you can connect with 70 different species, learn what makes
the interesting, and appreciate their natural beauty.
Go to BioBush.tv/rainbow or click the link in the description to learn more.
I hope you learned something worth knowing in this video.
You can get the scoop on birds by watching other videos on this channel, and you can
watch another video [subscribe] before you evacuate so you can know when a new video
drops.
This is getting gross.
Thanks for stopping by this week to learn what makes Life awesome!