The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think

by Jennifer Ackerman

Audubon’s experiment was a little like serving your cocktail guests fetid oysters and surmising they don’t have a taste for seafood. The results were “fully conclusive,” he said. “The power of smelling in these birds has been grossly exaggerated.” Later observers following Audubon’s lead went out of their way to explain how turkey vultures might find hidden food by any means other than smell. By watching or listening for the buzzing of flies, for instance, or by observing the movements of carrion-eating mice and ground squirrels scurrying to and from a concealed carcass, or domestic dogs sniffing it out with their keen noses. Vultures perhaps have such big olfactory bulbs not to spot prey, they theorized, but to detect the direction and quality of air currents for soaring. Fortunately, Betsy Bang came along to crush Audubon’s theory. Bang, a scientific illustrator at Johns Hopkins University in the late 1950s, dissected and sketched the nasal cavities of various bird species to illustrate her veterinarian husband’s articles on respiratory disease in birds.