Almost 200 years ago, the renowned U.S. naturalist John James Audubon hid a decaying pig carcass under a pile of brush to test vultures’ sense of smell. When the birds overlooked the pig—while one flocked to a nearly odorless stuffed deer skin—he took it as proof that they rely on vision, not smell, to find their food. His experiment cemented a commonly held idea. Despite later evidence that vultures and a few specialized avian hunters use odors after all, the dogma that most birds aren’t attuned to smell endured.
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