The day was hot, and I was standing downwind from a Great Blue Heron rookery. When the breeze picked up, the smell of decaying fish hit me like a physical blow. How can those birds stand the stench? I thought. It must be true what the books say: birds have no sense of smell. Well, that's what the books used to say. My vintage 1964 Encyclopedia Britannica devotes paragraphs to birds' extraordinary powers of vision and hearing, but just one line to sense of smell, noting it is "not well developed in most birds." "When I started at UCLA in the 1960s," agrees Bernice Wenzel, a behavioral psychologist who has done landmark studies on birds' sense of smell, "ornithologists snorted at the idea of a functional bird olfactory system."
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