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Can birds smell? |
9.11.2002 |
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Jane Burton |
I have often wondered whether birds use
their sense of smell more than they are given credit for.
The few birds proved to use smell include the tubenosed
seabirds – albatrosses, petrels and the like, the kiwi and
the American turkey buzzard. (Californian gas engineers
noticed that the buzzards would gather over leaking
pipelines!) These types of birds, together with waders and
ducks, have quite well developed olfactory lobes, the part
of the brain concerned with the sense of smell. Many others,
including the songbirds, have rudimentary olfactory lobes.
Could the sense of smell explain how
birds discover new kinds of food, especially items that we
put on bird-tables that are so unlike their natural food? A
bird could discover a new food by trial-an-error or by
watching other birds but occasionally an anecdote suggests
use of smell as the best explanation. One lady told of
putting a wooden bowl containing fat on her bird-table. It
fell off and landed upside-down. A great spotted woodpecker
pecked a hole in the bottom and continued to eat the fat.
This is not proof; it may just have been a very clever
woodpecker.
However, there is a slow accumulation
of scientific evidence that songbirds can smell things. Most
intriguing are the observations that starlings and blue tits
bring aromatic leaves to their nests in order, it is
believed, to kill nest parasites. In one experiment, blue
tits were observed to fetch leaves of lavender, yarrow and
fleabane. What is more, as the leaves in the nest lost their
aroma, the tits replaced them with fresh material.
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