At French’s Bird Institute, Ted F. Ey shows what a man would have to eat each day if he had the proverbial “appetite of a bird.” Birds eat nearly 100 times their own weight in food in a year. The average man eats less than 10 times his own weight annually.

SHOWN HERE, literally eating like a bird, is Ted F. Ey of Rochester, New York.

A study of parakeet eating habits has exploded the popular idea that birds have tiny appetites. Instead, it showed that the average parakeet eats nearly 100 times its own weight annually in seed, cuttlebone, gravel and water. Because the parakeet weighs only about 1 1/4 ounces, this actually means that it consumes about 8 pounds of food a year. To eat at the same rate, a man would have to devour some 16,000 pounds of food annually instead of his normal consumption of 1,300 pounds.

With his pet parakeet, “Frenchy,” watching from his shoulder, Ey is shown breakfasting on wheat cakes, with the rest of his day’s “bird rations” before him-45 pounds of meat, poultry, potatoes, vegetables, fruits, eggs, milk and other foods!

From Amazing But True Animals
by Doug Storer
1963