The feather-tailed hawk uses alcohol every day

The feather-tailed bat is related to humans. Picture: Joseph Wolf / Wikimedia Commons

On holiday people enjoy mead and also strong drinks. The use of alcohol is not justified in terms of public health, but this world can’t last.

This has also been confirmed by a feather-tailed bat living in Malaysia. It sucks half a pallet of crap every day and lives as far away from the mess of humanity as possible.

A small, squirrel-like mammal, therefore, feeds on nectar from the flowers of a palm tree. At best, the fermented broth contains up to 3.8 percent alcohol. When the animal itself weighs 50 grams, you would think that the housekeeper is constantly in a small mead.

This has been investigated. “How long have the small mammals in West Malaysia been rummaging,” ask German zoologists in a 2008 study published in the prestigious Proceedings of the American Academy of Sciences In Pnas publication.

You might think that it would be difficult to justify such a research question as a topic for a university final degree or a grant application, for example, but that’s how researchers in Malaysia followed the scavenging of these small squirrel-like animals from 1995 until 2006.

During several familiarization visits and field studies, it was found that the feather-tailed tern (Ptilocercus lowii ) actually consumes an amount of alcohol every day that would correspond to approximately ten pints in an adult person.

Still, it doesn’t get visibly drunk. It wouldn’t be to the home’s advantage for it to swing around in a tree or to forget that it is a small animal that, for example, is preyed upon by birds of prey.

So the liver of the tupaija burns alcohol at least as efficiently as the tilke, a bird also known in Finland that eats fermented rowan berries.

Thing we went to West Malaysia in the 1990s to study because the tupaija is a very close animal to us. We are related to the homesteader.

On the scale of millions of years of evolution, humans have evolved from small, tree-dwelling primate mammals. They survived under the feet of the dinosaurs and survived when an asteroid the size of Helsinki hit the Earth 66 million years ago.

It’s hard for a small person to grasp that, whether it’s in front of you or in front of you.