Cassell's Book of Birds, Reading 1
Boring Books for Bedtime Readings to Help You Sleep
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The Sensation of Smell in Birds
It has been generally asserted that birds of prey are gifted with an acute perception of odors, and are thus enabled to discover their food at a distance. But the rapidity with which falters are known to assemble around the carcass of an animal, too recently killed, to attract them by putrefactive exhalations, has induced many observers to consider them as being directed entirely by sight. That this latter is the preferable theory appears to be sufficiently established by the experiments of Audubon. They go to show that these birds possess a sense of smell very far inferior to that conferred upon carnivorous quadrupedes. It affords them no indication of its presence even when close at hand
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