For a long time, many people did not believe birds could smell.
John James Audubon, one of the greatest bird artists ever, was among the many people convinced that birds had no sense of smell. He believed they found food by sight only.
It took a smart lady named Betsy Bang to launch a scientific study of the sense of smell in birds. A medical illustrator at Johns Hopkins University, she dissected and drew the nasal cavities of various birds. She could not accept that birds with large, complex cavities had no sense of smell, as all the textbooks asserted.
Her research paper made a solid case for the existence of a sense of smell in birds. It eventually led many other scientists to become convinced.
Betsy also made a comparative study and determined the size of the olfactory lobe helped determine the ability of the bird to smell. Songbirds had small bulbs and the size ranged up through domestic fowl, feral pigeon, rail, turkey vulture, petrel, kiwi and the snow petrel.
A major breakthrough came when workers with Union Oil Company of California noticed that leaks in natural gas pipelines attracted turkey vultures. The gas had the components found in decaying flesh — ethyl mercaptan.
Union Oil therefore began adding higher concentrations of mercaptan to the gas to help them detect leaks. Such leaks caused vultures to come flocking and proved they had a good sense of smell. Finally, it was determined New Zealand’s brown kiwi used smell to locate earthworms.
Kiwis regularly blundered into things when running away from human observers, confirming that they had poor eyesight. Researchers conducted an experiment with a tame kiwi whereby the bird was presented with two buckets, one with earthworms buried under a layer of soil and one with soil but no worms. The kiwi would ignore the bucket with no worms and immediately probe the bucket with worms with its long beak. Obviously, it smelled the worms.
So, in conclusion, let it be noted that Betsy Bang got it right. Birds do indeed have a well-developed sense of smell.
