Puffins have such a fine sense of smell that they can find their colony by scent alone from a distance of nearly five hundred miles. House finches can detect predators by smell. Even ducks have a well-developed olfactory system. In fact, birds of all stripes use their sense of smell to navigate, locate burrows and nests, detect chemical signals during courtship, pick mates, avoid predators, and search out food. But as Gabrielle Nevitt has discovered, turkey vultures as sovereigns of olfactory foraging have only one set of real rivals in the bird world.
