Do Birds Have Taste Buds?
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Yes, birds have taste buds, just far fewer than you do. Recorded counts run from about two dozen in a Blue Tit, a small European relative of the chickadees, to about 770 in a young chicken. You have roughly 8,000.
Where are they? Mostly on the roof of the mouth, often clustered right where the salivary glands open.
Sugar is the strange part. As a group, birds lost their sweet receptor long ago (a receptor is the sensor on a taste cell that reacts to one kind of flavor).
Hummingbirds then built a new sweet sense out of the receptor that tastes savory, and songbirds, which make up nearly half of all living birds, managed the same thing on their own.
Spice is simpler. Birds don’t feel a chili pepper’s burn. Capsaicin, the chemical that makes peppers hot, trips a pain sensor in mammals, and the bird version of that sensor ignores it.
How many taste buds birds have, and where they are
The table covers a short list of birds, and most of its counts come from microscope work published in 1906. The Mallard and chicken numbers are the newer ones.
| Bird | Taste buds counted |
|---|---|
| Blue Tit | 24 |
| Pigeon | 59 |
| Japanese Quail | 62 |
| European Starling | 200 |
| Turkey | 200 |
| Parrot | 350 |
| Mallard | 375 |
| Chicken, 3 days old | 767 |
| Person, for comparison | about 8,000 |
Read those numbers as minimums, since better methods keep turning up more.
Chicken counts went from 8 in 1959 to 316 in 1985, and then, once researchers started tagging taste cells with molecular markers instead of hunting for them by eye, the count jumped to 767 in 2016.
Even that top count is about a tenth of yours.
Where exactly do they sit? Chickens have been mapped in detail.
About two-thirds of a chicken’s taste buds are on the roof of the mouth and about a fifth at the base of the tongue, with the rest scattered over the floor and sides of the mouth. The hard tip of the tongue has none.
Birds don’t chew. Food moves through the mouth fast, and they make little saliva while eating.
What saliva there is does real work. It washes food chemicals over the taste buds clustered around the salivary ducts, and the birds with the driest diets, seed eaters and insect eaters, produce the most.
Mallards have one more tasting spot. Their taste buds reach the tip of the bill, so they can taste food held between the bill tips.
How quickly does taste make the call? Offered plain water instead of sugar water, captive Ruby-throated Hummingbirds quit within three or four licks. That’s about a quarter of a second.
What flavors birds can taste
You can’t ask a bird what it tastes, so researchers piece it together from two kinds of evidence: the taste receptor genes a bird carries, and what it eats or refuses in feeding tests.
Most birds, by that evidence, pick up savory, bitter, and salty.
Savory, or umami (the meaty taste of broth), turns up in seed eaters and fish eaters alike. Every bird studied so far has it, penguins excepted.
Its strongest trigger is alanine, an amino acid (amino acids are the building blocks of protein), and both Red-winged Blackbirds and European Starlings prefer it.
Sweet is the odd one out. Birds are missing part of the only known sweet receptor in animals with backbones, and that loss goes back to their meat-eating dinosaur ancestors.
What does that look like in a real bird? In one lab test, chickens needed about 100 times more sugar than people do before they noticed it.
Bitter runs on a small kit. Birds average about four bitter-receptor genes to the 25 in people, and you might expect so few genes to blunt the taste.
In chickens, at least, they don’t. Chickens detect quinine, the bitter in tonic water, at about the same strength people do.
Salt and sour follow one rule in chicken tests: a little is fine, and a lot gets refused.
Given salty drinks, chickens prefer a mild one and turn down a strong one. Feed spiked with 6% citric acid? They ate about a third less of it.
Fat and calcium are still open questions. Chicken mouths carry receptors for both, but whether that adds up to a true taste hasn’t been settled.
| Taste | The general picture | Exceptions and limits |
|---|---|---|
| Sweet | Birds lost their sweet receptor. Chickens barely notice sugar | Hummingbirds and songbirds rebuilt a sweet sense from the savory receptor |
| Savory (umami) | Found in every bird studied, with alanine the strongest trigger | Penguins lost it |
| Bitter | Few genes, still sensitive | The owl and falcon genomes studied carry 2 bitter genes, some plant and insect eaters 10 or more. Penguins lost bitter |
| Salty | Mild salt accepted, strong salt refused (chicken tests) | Seabirds’ salt glands let them handle more |
| Sour | Mild acid accepted, strong acid avoided (chicken tests) | Tested mainly in chickens |
| Fat and calcium | Possible. Chickens carry receptors for both | Evidence is indirect |
| Chili heat | Not a taste. Birds don’t feel capsaicin’s burn | Birds still feel real heat and acid |
How taste differs from bird to bird
Hummingbirds turned a savory sense into a sweet one. Their insect-eating relatives, the swifts, still use the savory receptor for amino acids, but in hummingbirds that same receptor was reworked to answer to sugars instead: sucrose, glucose, and fructose.
How sensitive is the new sense? A study of Broad-billed Hummingbirds found that each of those sugars had its own detection threshold, meaning the weakest solution a bird would notice. Hummingbirds in general also seem able to pick the sweeter of two nectars.
A male Anna’s Hummingbird hovers beside a red nectar feeder, his rose-pink throat and crown catching the light. Photo: Katie Dragon/Shutterstock
Stitch that flash of crown and throat color yourself with the Anna’s Hummingbird cross-stitch pattern, set in a floral wreath.
Songbirds got there separately. Early in their history they made their own change to the same receptor, and because songbirds make up nearly half of all living birds, that adds up to a lot of birds that can taste sugar.
It isn’t limited to nectar drinkers, either. Given a choice between sugar water and plain water, songbirds that don’t feed on nectar still strongly preferred the sugar.
The Baltimore Oriole working a jelly feeder tastes the sweetness, and so does a flock of Cedar Waxwings stripping a berry bush.
A male Baltimore Oriole perched on a feeder stocked with orange halves and cups of jelly. Photo: Mike Truchon/Shutterstock
What about meat eaters like owls and falcons? No bird of prey made it into the counts above, so their genes are the better clue. The owl and falcon genomes studied carry just two bitter-taste genes each, while a White-throated Sparrow carries 13.
That gap follows diet. Across 48 bird genomes, the birds with more working bitter genes tended to be plant and insect eaters, which makes sense, since plants and insects are more likely to carry toxins than the meat an owl or falcon swallows.
Shorebirds put taste to work on the hunt. Sanderlings, Dunlins, Purple Sandpipers, and Red Knots pick up taste cues from prey buried in the sand and mud.
Penguins sit at the far end of all this. Their genes suggest every penguin has lost three of the five basic tastes: sweet, savory, and bitter. Add that to the list of amazing penguin facts.
A Gentoo Penguin lies on its pebble nest in a Falkland Islands colony with its bill open. Photo: David Osborn/Shutterstock
Why taste matters to wild birds
An American Robin bites into a ripe cherry. Photo: RLS Photo/Shutterstock
Part of taste’s job in the wild is keeping a bird from eating the wrong thing. One bitter mouthful sets off head shaking, beak wiping, and tongue movements, and the bird learns to treat that taste as a warning.
Farmers even use bitter compounds as bird repellents on crops.
What else does taste do for them?
- Starlings and blackbirds avoid tannins (the puckery compounds in many fruits and grains) at the strengths found in real food.
- Fruit eaters lean toward glucose and fructose over table sugar (sucrose), which many of them can’t digest.
- Sour probably flags spoiled food, since fermentation turns things sour.
- Laying birds go looking for calcium, snail shells included, especially in the evening. Whether taste is what guides them there hasn’t been shown.
And the robin in that cherry tree? It’s a songbird, so yes, it tastes the sugar in the cherry. For the rest of a robin’s menu, there’s a whole guide to what robins eat.
Robins and fruit go together, and the Robin Wooden Ornament brings that pairing home: a robin settled into a branch heavy with berries.
Can birds taste spicy food?
No. The heat in a chili pepper is pain, and birds don’t feel it.
In mammals, capsaicin switches on a pain receptor called TRPV1, the same sensor that warns of scalding heat. Birds carry TRPV1 too. Theirs just ignores capsaicin, while still reacting to real heat and to acid.
Chili plants come out ahead. The burn drives off mammals that would chew up the seeds, while birds eat the fruit and carry the seeds away, and cameras watching wild chili plants caught only birds taking the fruit.
Lab tests show the same split. Synthetic capsaicin, offered in food and in water, didn’t repel European Starlings, though it did repel rats.
Does hot pepper birdseed actually stop squirrels? One field trial put it to the test in 1999, with black-oil sunflower seed treated with capsaicin at three sites in New York.
- Gray squirrels ate less of the treated seed and spent less time feeding.
- Bird visits held steady at two sites and went up at the third.
- Eastern chipmunks weren’t put off at all.
That’s a single six-week trial, and one of its authors worked for a seed company.
The birds there kept coming back to seed they can’t feel burning. Long-term studies of birds eating capsaicin seed are scarce, though, so calling it proven safe would go past the evidence.
Seed swaps and other tactics are in the guide to keeping squirrels out of bird feeders.
Feeder tips based on how birds taste
Use plain white sugar in hummingbird nectar.
When wild Anna’s Hummingbirds were tested in California, they passed over aspartame, cyclamate, and acesulfame K in favor of real sugar and rejected sucralose. At strong doses, some shook their heads, pulled their bills back, or spat.
Erythritol and sorbitol were sneakier. The birds drank both as if they were sugar.
Erythritol tastes sweet without sugar’s calories, which makes it poor fuel for a bird that runs on nectar.
For proportions, use the hummingbird nectar recipe.
Leave salted nuts, chips, and other salty leftovers off the tray entirely. Salt at 2% or more is toxic to birds that lack the salt glands seabirds use to handle it.
What should go out instead? Start with the guide to feeding birds.
Hummingbird fan? You’ll find every hummingbird design in the Hummingbirds collection: heavy-metal Trochilidae tees and a hoodie (Trochilidae is the hummingbird family), cross-stitch patterns of an Anna’s and a Rufous Hummingbird, and a folk-style stick-and-stitch pattern.
Bird taste FAQ
What tastes can birds taste?
Most birds taste savory, bitter, and salty, and chickens react to sour too. Sweet depends on the bird: hummingbirds and songbirds taste sugar, but a chicken barely registers it.
What flavors can birds not taste?
Chili heat, for a start. Capsaicin’s burn registers through a pain receptor, and the bird version of that receptor ignores it.
Many birds outside the hummingbirds and songbirds also lack a working sweet receptor. Penguins go further, having apparently lost sweet, savory, and bitter.
Do chickens have taste buds?
Yes. When researchers tagged taste cells with molecular markers, three-day-old broiler chicks (the kind raised for meat) averaged 767 taste buds, roughly a tenth of a person’s count, with most of them on the roof of the mouth.
The buds start forming before the chick hatches, and each one lasts only three to four days. Young chicks are also more sensitive to bitter than adult chickens.
What does a bird’s tongue do?
Mostly, it handles food. A bird’s tongue isn’t a major sense organ, and its shape tracks what the bird eats.
Chickens and pigeons have short, hard tongues for swallowing, parrots and finches thick, muscular ones for working seeds, fish eaters spiny ones for slippery prey, waterfowl fringed ones for filtering, and woodpeckers and hummingbirds long ones for probing.
A hummingbird’s tongue tip is a tiny trap that opens and closes in nectar, and it works without the bird spending any energy.
Do pet birds have favorite foods?
They have the equipment. A parrot’s count of about 350 taste buds is among the higher bird counts on record, and cockatiels pick up bitter about as well as people do.
Which foods your own bird likes best is something you’ll only learn by offering them. Just keep salty snacks out of the bowl.
From the BWB shop, for hummingbird fans
Three hummingbird pieces to wear or stitch: the heavy-metal Trochilidae tee, a vintage-style Rufous Hummingbird cross-stitch pattern, and the Bird Nerd tee with its hummingbird silhouette.
