Okay, but can birds smell?
5/7/202634 min
E21. We're talking sense and scents with Dr. Danielle Whittaker, Oregon State, and author of The Secret Perfume of Birds, who spent a decade unraveling a 200-year-old myth that started with John James Audubon and a dead pig under a bush.
In this episode:
- The bird that smells like a fresh-baked sugar cookie
- Why preen oil is a dating profile written in chemistry, and how seabirds use the same chemical cue that's now leading albatross parents to feed their chicks plastic
- The bonus myth Danielle wants gone
New here? Listen, follow, and tell a friend who still thinks birds can't smell.
All audio, video, and images in this episode are either original to Okay, But... Birds (© Okay Media, LLC) or used under license/permission from the respective rights holders. Bird media from the Macaulay Library is used courtesy of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology as follows:
- Brown-headed Cowbird audio contributed by Wil Hershberger, ML94262
- Dark-eyed Junco audio contributed by Wil Hershberger, ML94361
- Red Knot audio contributed by Lucas DeCicco, ML516895
- Crested Auklet audio contributed by Sampath Seneviratne, ML132014
- Laysan Albatross audio contributed by Ted Miller, ML117679
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsDanielle Whittaker· Guest0:00
And I got back to the lab, and I started to open the bag to take the bird out, and I got this overwhelming fresh bakery scent. [laughs] And I was like, "Who, who brought cookies to the lab?" [laughs] And then I realized it was the bird.
Scott Taylor· Host0:11
[upbeat music] In 2013, I found myself on a small cruise ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, traveling from Sierra Leone, Africa, to Brazil, and ultimately to the tip of South America, Ushuaia, Argentina. If you've never been on the open ocean, let me paint you a picture. Ocean, wind, sky, sun, nothing else, save for the occasional seabird. But in the equatorial ocean, that was a rare occurrence. It's disorienting, to say the least. As visual organisms, humans often use landmarks, and this is perhaps stating the obvious, there are none of those in the open ocean. Despite what one well-intentioned cruise guest thought and asked me, the equator is not a visible line [laughs] on the Earth. When after several days I finally spotted Ascension Island, I relaxed. Land. And soon after spotting the island, I spotted Ascension Island frigatebirds wheeling in the air around it. This endemic species can only be found on this island, one of the most isolated on the planet. Seabirds are fascinating. Most have delayed reproduction, meaning