emergency feed

[debid]

Oh, and if you have tallow or lard in your cabinet, this is a good fat for them. I'd toss some in the porridge, especially if you don't have meat to give. Any beans and rice you have are also fine, just cook them.

 

[saysfaa]

... Birds cannot digest lactose so dairy is not a good protein source...

Milk, skim milk, sour milk, buttermilk, clobber, whey, and other dairy products were common in rations developed by the universities who did wide scale, systematic research of feeds for livestock. The main downside was they tended to cost more than other protein sources unless the chickens were on farms that had also had milk cows.* Most farms and a surprising number of people in towns did then.

I expect chickens don't make lactase so probably don't digest lactose; at least not the way people do. But it didn't cause problems for the chickens when milk products were the main protein source.

*Even then, it cost more if the milk could be used other ways. But often there were times there was some milk that didn't have better uses.

 

[Perris]

Birds cannot digest lactose so dairy is not a good protein source.

Milk is not just lactose.

"My favorite story about tits concerns Blue Tits in England. In the early 1900s the British had milk delivered by wagons to their doorstops. At the beginning of the 20th Century milk was delivered to British doors in bottles that had no tops so birds had easy access to the fat-rich cream that settled at the top of the bottle. Although birds lack the enzyme to digest lactose, cream has little lactose in it and is full of fat energy. Blue Tits learned to drink the cream from the tops of the bottles. Later, after WWI, for health reasons the bottles were sealed with waxed cardboard seals. But the birds just learned to pierce that. Then aluminum foil was used to cover the bottle tops. But this didn’t foil the birds either. Watch.

Blue Tit
Apparently a few Blue Tits learned to pierce the aluminum bottle and cardboard seal top to reach the cream and by the 1950s all the Blue Tits in the UK had learned the trick. But how did the birds learn? You would think that one naïve Blue Tit watching an experienced one would learn from the latter. Experiments have shown that the uninitiated Blue Tit did not learn by watching the process but was intrigued enough by the other bird opening the bottle top that it tried to do it itself. The naïve bird will finally open its first bottle, although often by a slightly different process than the one it observed.

Blue Tits also learn from other birds which foods to avoid. In an experiment, caged Blue Tits watched videos of other tits rejecting certain foods. They then avoided those foods themselves. Clever birds." https://ornithology.com/the-tits-birds-of-course/

This phenomenon also demonstrates that birds can innovate, consume new foods, and much else besides.