Humans have a pretty clear and easy to understand digestive system. Your mouth and teeth chew food, this food gets pushed down the oesophagus by peristalsis and your stomach uses its digestive juices to further break this food down. This is the process with other mammals too. But what about birds? Birds don’t have teeth to break down their food in the first place so how does food get processed? This article explores the question of ‘how do birds chew their food’, so if you’re a bird watcher, bird owner or are simply curious, this article is for you 

“Chewing” for birds happens in the gizzard, it is not carried out by the teeth like in humans. The gizzard is a muscle sack that contracts when food enters it, this contracting ‘chews’ and breaks down food. Sand, grit and small rocks that the bird eats prior also help with this process. 

How do birds chew their food?

Birds do not chew their food while the food is in their mouths, they don’t have teeth. Teeth need jawbones, if birds had teeth and jawbones these would be too heavy to support in flight. But the absence of teeth doesn’t mean that the bird can’t digest hard foods. In fact, birds eat hard foods like seeds and grains all the time. They use a series of notches or spikes inside their beaks or tongue to secure food and their gizzards and digestive juices to digest food.

To start off, a birds bill or beak is used to take bites of food. The bites don’t serve to fully break up food but rather to catch the food or break the food into pieces large enough to swallow whole.

A number of birds have a series of spikes and notches on the inside of their tongue or beaks. Prey become trapped between these notches and this prevents escape 

The food will then move into the bird’s crop, this is where food is stored, storing food in the crop allows the bird to digest food more slowly.

Food that is moved down into the first part of the stomach (the proventriculus) to be digested becomes further broken down and softened by mucus, gastric acid and digestive juices 

Birds have a stomach like a pouch called a gizzard which crushes food. When a bird eats and the food enters the gizzard the muscles of the gizzard contract and crush the food. Some birds will also eat stones, grit or sand, these help with the digestion of foods as well. If the food is particularly tough it will have to move between the gizzard and the proventriculus many times. After this ‘chewing’ the food will move on to the rest of the digestive system.

How do birds not choke?

Birds are not designed to choke. You’ll be hard-pressed to find evidence of a bird choking as birds eat whole unchewed food all the time. In humans, choaking is caused by large pieces of food bypassing the epiglottis (which seals off the breathing apparatus as we eat) and entreating to the air tubes, this cuts off airflow to your nose and mouth causing you to choke

Birds don’t have an epiglottis which prevents food from entering the airways but this isn’t the reason why birds don’t choke. The design of a birds tongue and mouth is what allows food to move not into the tracheal opening (the glottis, the breathing tube) but rather move into the oesophagus (the food tube).

When food moves into the oesophagus, the tracheal opening of the bird closes. The only way a bird would choke is if it ate food that is too large, food that is larger than its oesophagus. This would cause a blockage in the food tube and simultaneously close the air tube, if the air tube is closed for long enough this would cause choking.  Thankfully, over time, birds have learnt how much food they can swallow at once 

What is the purpose of a bird’s beak?

Beaks are used in the initial stages of digestion but also for everyday tasks that humans would otherwise use their hands for. This includes fighting, preening, probing for food, feeding their babies and even courtship. The size and shape of the bird’s beak determine to what extent a bird can do all of this.

Conclusion 

In conclusion, a bird does not chew its food using its teeth as humans do, it rather uses its gizzard to chew food, the gizzard is a muscle that contracts to crush food, birds may also eat sand, rocks and grit to ‘chew’ the food. A bird will choke if food is too large as it will get stuck in the oesophagus and close the airways for too long 

If you enjoyed this article then you may also be interested in other bird related articles. Here are some articles that you may be interested in: Why is my bird suddenly aggressive?, How do birds defend themselves?, Why does my bird eat its poop?, Why is my bird throwing up?, Why does my bird preen me?