by Lara Jackson

Created on: September 06, 2010

It once was common knowledge: pet birds need grit.  Cages came with "grit cups" and no pet bird supply list was complete without a box of grit.  Then, as it sometimes does, common knowledge changed.  Veterinarians reported birds brought in to their offices, sometimes alive but often dead, with impacted crops, so full of grit the birds could no longer eat or digest their food.  Pet bird authors and experts caught on, and advised no more grit.  It could be deadly!

Who's right?  Who's wrong?  Do birds need grit?  Can it kill?  The answer, as most answers to such divided issues are, is somewhere in the middle.

Birds, of course, don't have teeth.  Although parrots and some other birds "pre-process" their food by chewing, food is further broken down and processed in the bird's ventriculus - popularly known as the gizzard.  The ventriculus is a specialized section of the gastrointestinal tract, tough and muscular enough to grind up food.  Small, indigestible items - grit - remain in the ventriculus, and further aid in the grinding and processing of the food.  The finer the food is ground, the more readily it will be digested, and the more nutritional value a bird will gain from it.

That's how grit is used, but it doesn't answer the question, do birds need it?

Some birds almost certainly do.  Many birds swallow their food whole, and when those foods include tough-to-digest items such as whole, unhulled seeds and grains, the ventriculus is simply not able to grind them down into a digestible form without the addition of grit.  Among our captive birds, doves, pigeons, quail, pheasants, and chickens all require grit, especially if fed a diet including unhulled, unprocessed seeds or grains.  The exceptions prove the rule - chickens fed primarily processed chicken feed, for instance, don't absolutely require grit.  If they're fed only unprocessed grains without grit, though, it can mean a slow death from starvation, no matter how much they eat.

Most bird experts agree with me on that.  The real controversy begins on the question of whether birds who chew or hull their seeds before eating them need grit.  This includes all of our most popular pet birds: finches, canaries, and all parrots from parakeets to macaws.  Do these birds need grit?  The answer seems to be no, they don't need it.  Bird-keepers have kept, bred and raised all of these birds for years, even decades

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