Every year thousands of birders flock to the Peruvian Amazon to the famous cliffs and river banks, where at least 21 different species of parrots congregate in large numbers to eat dirt to visit. This is not just a strange phenomenon and to experience for themselves, but the highly localized nature of this bizarre behavior makes for easy viewing of some of the most beautiful birds that you could ever hope to see mixing in one place.
Research at these sites has shown that the parrots highly specific preferences to the extent that they are their activities focus on narrow veins of clay runs during the cliffs and river banks due to their specific chemical properties. Let's back up for a minute and look dirty even though eating in birds and other organisms as a whole, because it has some very different functions. The technical term for when an organism intentionally consumed ground directly or mixed with other food item is geophagy.
Geophagy is having been documented in reptiles, mammals, butterflies and isopods surprisingly widespread in the animal kingdom. Geophagy is documented even in human cultures around the world and is a particularly well-known behavior of pregnant women in many traditional cultures. In these cases the habit of eating dirt, especially the need for the acquisition of essential nutrients that are not found in a particular creature typical diet is attributed. In birds, however, the joint statement is not dietary but is on the bird need gritty material in the stomach together. Since birds do not have teeth breakdown help food and start the digestion in the mouth, swallow many types dirt with stones or sand, in the muscular stomach (aka gizzard) sit and help grind food before it is sent on it's merry way on the path of digestion. The size of grain that a particular bird receives in direct proportion to their body size and can range anywhere from 0.5 mm in birds the size of a sparrow, all the way up to 2.5 cm in ostriches.
Now again the geophagous parrots in Peru. It turns out that the dirt of course they do not consume at all, with only 5% of it is still larger than 0.05 mm in diameter, and most of it is pure tone that is less than 0.2 mm. So what is the problem? As amazing as it may sound, these parrots are actually eating clay to the potentially deadly toxic compounds, such as quinine and tannic acid, which are commonly found in the seeds and unripe fruits they counteract found so much. In the acidic conditions of the stomach of the bird these toxic compounds are positively charged, while minerals such as smectite, kaolin and mica in the clay they have negatively charged cation exchange sites that bind the toxins and make them consume neutral. You could even go so far as to say that these parrots are self-medication, we take a similar antacids if we have an upset stomach....
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