But for a long time, scientists thought birds couldn’t smell much. They didn’t display any of the more obvious nose-inspired behaviors—sniffing butts or snuffling truffles. Birds were more like us, it seemed, eye-minded creatures with highly evolved and sophisticated visual systems. “An extraordinary development of one set of organs is never accomplished but at the expense of some other set,” wrote one ornithologist in 1892. “In this case the organs of the sense of smell have been the martyrs.” That view has radically changed. The shift began in the 1960s with experiments revealing that
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