Exploring Nature: Can Birds Smell?

Do birds have a sense of smell? Are they capable of smelling things, or just dependent on taste, sight and hearing?

To answer this question, a lady named Betsy Bangs and a gas pipe line both played major roles.

Betsy was a medical illustrator with limited training in biology, but she studied olfactory functions and noted that many birds had elaborate nasal tissues that probabl allowed them to detect odors. Base on her research, she listed the birds with the largest olfactory lobes, in descending order, as snow petrel, kiwi, petrel, turkey vulture, nightja hoatzin, rail, feral pigeon, shorebir domestic owl and songbird.