Abstract
If it were not for a long history of doubt concerning the existence and functioning of an olfactory system among birds, there would be no particular reason to single out this class for discussion. The tone for one prevailing attitude about birds’ sense of smell was set more than a century ago by the advice of Audubon, the American naturalist and painter of birds, who recommended that his readers “... abandon the deeply-rooted notion that this bird (the turkey vulture) possesses the faculty of discovering, by his sense of smell, his prey at an immense distance...” (1826, p. 173). Although it became known that at least some forms had well-developed olfactory epithelium, nerves, and bulbs, the ability to detect odors and to respond differentially to them remained a highly controversial topic. Anecdotes were exchanged in the literature to support each side, and contradictory results were reported from experiments of variably skillful design (see Soudek, 1927; Stager, 1964; Strong, 1911; and Walter, 1943 for reviews), the sum of which created a generally negative impression. This era of skepticism has been replaced recently by a more positive one, for which the work of Cobb (1960 a) is proposed as a suitable origin. He studied certain aspects of the comparative anatomy of the avian brain and included a section on the olfactory bulbs that provided impetus for a systematic consideration of the possibility of an olfactory system with different degrees of function in different avian forms.
Bibliographic assistance was received from the UCLA Brain Information Service which is part of the Neurological Information Network of NINDS and is supported under Contract DHEW PH-43–66–59. Financial support was provided by NSF grant GB 7677 to the author.
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Wenzel, B.M. (1971). Olfaction in Birds. In: Beidler, L.M. (eds) Olfaction. Handbook of Sensory Physiology, vol 4 / 1. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-65126-7_15
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