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FACT: Birds? Making milk!? It’s more likely than you think.
By Liz Clayton Fuller
In a world of upwards of 10,000 species of birds, only three kinds of birds create “milk”: doves/pigeons, flamingos and emperor penguins. This is not your typical mammalian milk because, as you may or may not know, birds do not have nipples! But it is compositionally similar to that milk and serves a similar purpose, though it doesn’t bear much physical resemblance. Unfortunately it looks like cottage cheese. Woof.
So how do birds make milk? They secrete it from the lining of their crops, which is a pouch-like part of their digestive system typically used for food storage. The hormone that stimulates pigeon milk production is called prolactin, which is the same hormone that causes lactation in mammals like us!
So let’s start with Pigeon Milk! The modern day pigeon or rock dove typically lives in kind of unforgiving environments like cities, so when their babies are born they need a lot of protein and fat—and the pigeons don’t have a reliable way of providing that outside of, you guessed it, creating crop milk! They start making milk a few days before the eggs are due to hatch and start feeding it to the babies, aka squabs, as soon as they…
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