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Comment by lofaszvanitt | Hacker News Reader

Just put out some wasabi coated peanuts... and have a good laugh when you see them with their open beaks trying to relieve the spiciness and cool down their mouths :DDDD.

And... they come back for more. Maybe they enjoy the ride.

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I don't know about wasabi, but birds in general are completely immune to capsaicin, the substance that makes hot peppers hot. I grow a variety of hot peppers here in Brazil and the sabiá (a Brazilian songbird) particularly likes the pimenta malagueta, a little chili equivalent to the ones used in Thai food... I've seen a single bird consume like 50 of these small and very hot peppers in 10 minutes.

> little chili equivalent to the ones used in Thai food

Birds-eye chillies, you mean?

Bonnie's Plants and others sell them as "Thai Hot Chilies" the colloqueal name for this particular subspecies varies wildly by region. I've also seen "thai pepper". Generally referring to long thin, thin-walled peppers full of seeds. I've never (personally) seen "birds-eye chilie" used in the wild.

In Singapore and Malaysia, they’re called chilli padi

There's actually an interesting reason for this! Capsaicin evolved primarily* to keep mammals from eating pepper seeds, since mammalian digestive systems destroy the seeds, but birds' systems do not. Birds use a different protein complex for detecting heat than mammals, so capsaicin binds to the mammalian protein complex and activates it, but does not bind to the avian complex.

* excuse the short hand anthropomorphizing of evolution here - I know.

Good to know, thanks.

I thought about this too, but I never seen this reaction from them, so I thought, maybe it was all about the spicyness. Who knows, anyway, since they are not stupid, they won't come back for more if it was somehow detrimental for them.

And for extra laughs you can just poison them.

Please don’t torment animals.

I agree with your reaction. But for thoroughness, I accidentally left out a few cups of salsa a few years ago, intended for compost and I forgot to come back to them for a while, which attracted crows. I felt really awful that I might have left them something which could make them sick. Gratefully it was highly unlikely, as other comments mention they don’t react to capsaicin the way we do.

They’re still interested in leftovers and and general perceived offerings, so don’t leave stuff that you’re not certain are harmless. But spicy-to-you probably isn’t actually a torment.

And crows are smart. They just flew high enough to drop the accidental offerings on the ground and lose interest.

Anyway definitely don’t poison animals, but it’s also good to know when or whether you’re actually taking that risk.

Poison birds that are neck deep in the trashcan fishing for leftover food?

Unless of course you blind them and stuff them with liquor, or keep them in bird cages unable to move. Then it's a-okay.

Just please keep torture away from human eyes so that we can gore on the output of animal cruelty, guilt-free.

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