Can Birds Urinate?

If you like to spend time with your pet bird perched on your arm or shoulder, you're likely going to wear his bird droppings every once in a while. Birds tend to go wherever and whenever they feel the need, pouring their black and white waste over anything below them at the time. This waste isn't urine -- at least not in the way you think of urine -- but it serves the same purpose.

  1. Uric Acid

    • Birds don't have bladders like mammals do, but they have kidneys that help convert liquid waste into part of the droppings. Birds need to watch their weight to fly effectively, so they don't want to store liquid waste in a bladder. Instead, the kidneys help convert liquid waste into a concentrated form of uric acid. This ends up in a white, pasty substance that passes into the bird's intestines. Birds also don't have a urethra, or a special opening designed to expel urine. The white uric acid concentration uses the same exit as solid waste.

    Feces

    • When you see bird poo that is mostly white with a black blob in the middle, you're seeing the bird's version of urine -- the white stuff -- surrounding its feces -- the black stuff. Birds process solid waste through their intestines. The white, pasty uric acid mixes with the poop in the intestine so they both pass out of the same opening together. This opening is called the cloaca.

    Eggs

    • When most baby mammals are forming, they typically have room to grow inside the placenta. When the fetuses begin to urinate, it becomes part of the amniotic fluid, and the mom's body often regulates the amount of that fluid. It doesn't work that way with bird eggs. The baby birds only have the space allocated by the eggshell. The shell isn't porous, which means any waste the chicks produce stays inside the eggs. Since there's no room to add liquid from urine in the egg, chicks can release only gaseous waste. They consume some of the nutrient fluid in the egg as they grow, but that growth prohibits them releasing any liquid back into the eggs. They start pooping after they start eating solid food when they hatch.

    Using Bird Droppings

    • While bird droppings don't have urine in the traditional sense, the concentrated uric acid combined with the feces can make an excellent fertilizer for your garden. Your pet bird is unlikely to produce enough guano, as this fertilizer is called, to be useful, but you can buy guano at garden supply and home improvement stores. There's some controversy about whether guano should be harvested because the harvesting is dangerous and the resource isn't quickly renewable, but it's an organic fertilizer option for your garden.