Birders often wonder can birds smell and do birds have taste buds? Discover why some birds can taste and smell—but others can’t.
Bird Senses: Can Birds Smell or Taste Their Food?
Updated on Oct. 07, 2024
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How Birds Use Their Senses to Find Food
Does a porcelain berry taste like a blueberry to a gray catbird? Does a block of lard smell like frying bacon to a northern flicker? The short answer is no. While some avian species do have a well-adapted sense of taste or smell, they can’t distinguish between flavors and odors the way humans can. “They’re not picking up every ingredient in the suet you put out,” says José Ramírez-Garofalo, an ornithology researcher at Rutgers University in New Jersey and the director of Freshkills Biological Station in Staten Island, New York.
Can Birds Taste Their Food?
In general, birds have a primitive sense of taste that lets them know when something is salty or bitter. This likely helps them gather essential nutrients like sodium while steering clear of toxic compounds.
So what does this mean for the daily buffet you provide for your feathered visitors? “I would be more concerned with nutritional content than flavor,” José says. Some species will gravitate toward certain foods over others, even if you think you’re giving them a more delectable option. For example, western bluebirds will go wild for protein-rich mealworms because they’re insectivores. Orioles will get their beaks deep in jelly or marmalade because they typically forage for high-energy fruits.
“We try to accommodate as many different birds as we can in our yard, and mealworms seem to be a favorite food. Our cardinals also enjoy a mixture of peanut butter and seeds in a log feeder,” says Birds & Blooms reader Nancy Brown.
Muted taste buds can also be a boon. Birds can consume capsaicin, the fiery extract in peppers, without spontaneously combusting. “They don’t get the same explosion of spice that mammals do,” José says. So it’s all right to add basic cayenne powder to birdseed and suet: The heat should deter squirrels and bears and allow the birds to come back for more.
Can Birds Smell Their Food?
While taste and smell go hand in hand for humans, the two senses don’t seem as inextricable in avian species. In fact, birds show a lot of variability in their olfactory powers, José says. Scavengers like turkey vultures can sniff out stinky chemicals that waft off carcasses from miles away (note that black vultures don’t share the same ability).
Tubenoses, which include albatrosses, shearwaters and other far-flying seabirds, use the hypersensitive cavities on their beaks to smell krill and fish and even to navigate open stretches of ocean.
Often, birds use odors to communicate with one another. Dark-eyed juncos drop clues about their physique in the compounds they secrete in their preen oil. Male crested auklets do something similar when they’re trying to attract a female—by emitting a perfume that smells like tangerines.
That’s not to say that your feeders will smell like a heady citrusy cologne after the cardinals, chickadees and grackles clear them out.
Why Do Hummingbirds Eat Sweet Foods?
In ancient evolutionary history, birds weren’t able to sample sweetness. That is, until hummingbirds cracked the syrupy code. Genetic studies on the well-known nectar sippers show that they adapted taste receptors for savory foods into sugar detectors. The switch helped them shift to a carbohydraterich diet, adding a big calorie boost to their frenzied lives.
Now, scientists think songbirds might have made a similar upgrade to their palates, which could explain why waxwings gorge on berries and orioles adore jelly.
Bird Eyesight
The term “eagle-eyed” for sharp vision is no accident. As birding experts Kenn and Kimberly Kaufman explain, nearly all birds see at least two or three times as much detail as humans, making them able to spot food—or approaching predators—that much farther away. Most birds have excellent color vision, too. Night birds like owls may have a biological trade-off: They see very well in dim light, but their perception of colors may not be as good.
Another advantage birds have is seeing ultraviolet light. To humans, male and female northern mockingbirds look exactly the same—but birds are able to tell the difference because the two have different ultraviolet markings.
Because their eyes are on the sides of their heads, most birds take in two separate pictures of their world, one on each side, with only a limited area of two-eyed vision toward the front. That means while they see lots of detail, it is harder for them to judge distance on the sides until they move their heads.
And birds’ eyes process information much faster than human eyes. When you watch a film, the projector may show 24 frames every second, but your eyes blend them together so you see smooth, continuous motion on the screen. For a bird, the same film would look like a quick series of separate pictures. This rapid visual judgment is very helpful for a bird zooming among tree branches, for example.
About the Expert
José Ramírez-Garofalo is an ornithology researcher and Ph.D. candidate in the Lockwood Lab at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Jose also serves as the director of science and research development with Freshkills Park Alliance on Staten Island, New York.
Sources
- National Library of Medicine: The Avian Taste System
- National Library of Medicine: Birds Generally Carry a Small Repertoire of Bitter Taste Receptor Genes
- North American Bluebird Society: Mealworms Factsheet
- LibreTexts Biology: Taste and Smell – Tastes and Odors
- All About Birds – Do vultures find dead animals by smell or by tracking predators or scavengers on the ground?
- Scientific Reports – Olfactory-cued navigation in shearwaters: linking movement patterns to mechanisms
- ResearchGate: Intraspecific preen oil odor preferences in Dark-eyed Juncos (Junco hyemalis)
- University of Alaska Fairbanks: Bird feathers and the smell of tangerines
- eLife: Complementary shifts in photoreceptor spectral tuning unlock the full adaptive potential of ultraviolet vision in birds
- Science: Complementary shifts in photoreceptor spectral tuning unlock the full adaptive potential of ultraviolet vision in birds
- Science: Early origin of sweet perception in the songbird radiation
