How Do Toothless Birds Chew Their Food?

Birds don’t have teeth, but they use their beaks to grab food and swallow it. In fact, they don’t need to chew before swallowing.

Eagles, for example, use their sharp beaks to tear food into pieces and then swallow large chunks of meat. Finches and sparrows have beaks like nutcrackers, allowing them to crack open hard nuts or seeds before swallowing them whole. Seed-eating birds have numerous mucus glands in their mouths that lubricate seeds before swallowing. Additionally, their salivary glands secrete digestive enzymes to begin the digestion process.

Humans have a gag reflex that prevents us from swallowing unchewed food, but birds don’t. Even small birds can swallow pieces of food that would choke us.

For instance, the tiny palm swift can swallow a whole deer mouse, and the great blue heron can gulp down a large fish. Birds that eat small particles, like insectivorous species, tend to have relatively narrow esophagi.

In contrast, birds that swallow large chunks of food have highly elastic esophagi and stretchy neck skin  allowing them to accommodate big pieces.