Bird urates: what green, yellow or red urates mean

Quick answer

Cockatiel on a perch

Birds do not pass urine and faeces separately. Every dropping is three things at once, and the part that carries most of the early warning is the chalky white portion called the urates.

Urates are the bird equivalent of the urine a mammal produces. When they change colour, they are reporting on the liver and the kidneys, and they usually do it days or weeks before the bird looks unwell.

• Normal urates are white to cream, opaque and semi-solid, sitting on top of or beside the darker faecal part.
• Green or yellow urates mean bile pigment is spilling into the urinary side. That points at the liver and it is not normal at any age.
• Red, pink, or chocolate-brown urates mean blood or breakdown products of blood. Treat as an emergency.
• A clear watery ring around a dropping is normal urine. A ring that keeps getting bigger is polyuria, which is a different problem from diarrhoea.
• Judge colour on fresh droppings, on plain white paper, in daylight. Nothing else gives you a reliable reading.

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Green or yellow urates, and red or brown urates, are both same-day veterinary problems.

Green and yellow urates are biliverdin, the bird's main bile pigment, appearing where it should never be. Birds do not turn visibly jaundiced the way mammals do, so discoloured urates are often the only outward sign of significant liver disease.

Red or brown discolouration means blood, or haemoglobin released from destroyed red cells. Heavy metal poisoning, kidney disease, and bleeding from the reproductive or cloacal tissue all present this way, and all of them get worse quickly.
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Decide in 60 seconds

Why the white part exists

A mammal dissolves its nitrogen waste in water and stores the result in a bladder. That is expensive in water and heavy in the air, so birds do it differently.

A bird converts most of its waste nitrogen into uric acid, which is barely soluble. It comes out of the kidney as a suspension rather than a solution, needing only a fraction of the water a mammal would use. What you see on the tray as a white paste is that suspension.

There is nowhere to store it. A bird's ureters open directly into the urodeum, a chamber of the cloaca, and the material moves out with everything else. That is why a bird cannot have a urinary accident, cannot strain to pass urine alone, and cannot show you a change in urine without showing it to you inside a dropping.

It also means one tray gives you a readout on the gut, the kidneys and the liver at the same time, refreshed many times a day. No other easy home observation covers that much ground.

What a normal dropping looks like

The faecal portion. A coiled or tubular solid, usually dark green to brown depending on diet. Seed eaters run greener, pellet eaters run browner or match the pellet colour, and a bird eating a lot of vegetables can pass almost anything.

Budgerigar on a scale

The urate portion. Chalky, opaque, white through to cream. Semi-solid, so it holds a shape rather than running.

The liquid urine. Clear and colourless, forming a small halo around the rest. On absorbent bedding you may never see it.

Smaller birds pass many more droppings per day than larger ones. There is no correct count to aim for. What matters is your own bird's usual pattern, which is why owners who look every day catch things owners who look occasionally do not.

Urate colours and what they mean

The single mistake owners make here is reading the wrong part of the dropping. Green faeces in a budgerigar eating a seed mix is entirely normal. Green in the chalky white portion is not, and the two sit side by side in the same dropping.

If you are unsure which part has changed colour, photograph the dropping on plain white paper and let an avian vet decide. That photograph is worth more than any description over the phone.

What discolours a dropping and means nothing

Diet colours droppings honestly and harmlessly. Beetroot, berries, pomegranate, red peppers and dyed pellets all show up on the tray, and they stain the faecal part rather than the urates.

A single very watery dropping after a fright, a car journey, a hot day, or a large helping of cucumber or melon is a water load passing through, not disease.

A bird that has just laid, or is about to, passes fewer but much larger droppings because she has been holding them.

Antibiotics and some other medications change gut colour and consistency for as long as the course lasts. That is expected. Tell the prescribing vet if it does not settle after the course ends.

The way to separate diet from disease is to stop the suspect food for two days. Diet-related colour disappears. Disease-related colour does not.

Volume changes: polyuria is not diarrhoea

The clear liquid and the solid faeces are produced by different organs, and they fail differently.

Cockatiel with yellow crest

Polyuria is more clear liquid with a still-formed faecal portion. The dropping looks like a normal dropping sitting in a puddle. That is a kidney, liver, hormonal, or hydration story.

Diarrhoea is loss of the formed faecal portion itself, so the solid part is unshaped, smeared, or absent. That is a gut story.

Owners describe both as watery droppings, and they are treated completely differently. A separate guide covers that distinction in detail. Look at whether the solid part still holds its shape before you decide which one you are seeing.

Persistent polyuria in a bird that is also drinking more deserves a proper work-up rather than watching. Kidney disease, liver disease, diabetes, chronic egg laying, infection and some toxins all produce it, and none of them improve on their own.

The routine that catches this early

Line the cage tray or floor with plain white paper, unprinted, changed daily. Wood shavings, corn cob and printed newspaper all hide or distort exactly the colours you are trying to read.

Look at the tray once a day in daylight, before the droppings dry. Artificial light at night is where green urates get missed.

Weigh the bird weekly on a gram scale and write it down. Liver and kidney disease usually move the weight before they move the behaviour.

Check the vent feathers when you look at the bird. Green or yellow staining under the tail is often the first thing an owner notices without knowing what it is.

Photograph anything unusual immediately, on the white paper, with something ordinary next to it for scale. Droppings change appearance in minutes.

What never to do

Do not restrict water because the droppings look wet. Polyuria is a symptom, and a bird that cannot drink freely while it is losing extra water becomes dehydrated fast.

Budgerigar grooming on a branch

Do not add extra fruit to flush the kidneys. It adds sugar and water, makes the droppings wetter still, and destroys the one measurement you were using to track the problem.

Do not give cranberry products, human urinary supplements, apple cider vinegar, or leftover antibiotics. None of them treat an avian liver or kidney, and some add their own risk.

Do not clean the tray before a veterinary appointment. Bring the paper, or bring photographs.

Do not wait for the bird to look ill. Birds conceal illness until they cannot, and abnormal urates in a bird that is still bright, eating and talking is the useful early version of the same disease.

Do not assume a green dropping is diet without testing it. Two days off the suspect food answers the question, and it costs nothing.

When to get help

See an avian veterinarian the same day for green, yellow, red or brown urates, whether or not the bird seems well.

Go immediately for a bird passing no droppings at all, straining with a pumping tail, sitting fluffed on the floor of the cage, or showing red or brown urates together with weakness.

Book a routine appointment for persistent polyuria, a bird drinking noticeably more than usual, or urates that have looked slightly off for more than a few days on an unchanged diet.

Bring the actual tray paper if you can, or photographs taken in daylight, the current diet including treats and supplements, the weekly weight record, and a list of anything the bird might have chewed. Metal from cage fittings, curtain weights, costume jewellery and old paint is a common and treatable cause of the worst-looking urate colour of all, and the history is what puts it on the list.