Biologists at Bielefeld overturn accepted opinion

Songbirds can't smell. At least, that's what everybody thought up to now. However, the truth looks different: Two biologists at Bielefeld University, Dr. Barbara Caspers and Tobias Krause, have found out that young zebra finches can distinguish their own nest from other nests by the way it smells. You can read their study in the online version of the journal Biology Letters published by the renowned British Royal Society.

In a series of trials, these fledglings that were just starting to fly had to choose between the smell of their own nest and the smell of another zebra finch nest. The young birds clearly preferred the smell of their own nest. The results show that songbirds have a strong sense of smell, and that one of the things for which they can use it is for spatial orientation in their environment.
For a long time, scientists had assumed that birds in general do not possess a sense of smell. Seagulls were the first birds in which this was shown to be wrong.

You can read the study in:
Biology Letters online from 29.09.2010, doi:10.1098/rsbl.2010.0775

Contact:
Dr. Barbara Caspers, Bielefeld University
Faculty of Biology
Tel.: 0521 106-2825, E-Mail: barbara.caspers@uni-bielefeld.de

Tobias Krause, Bielefeld University
Faculty of Biology
Tel.: 0521 106-2841, E-Mail: tobias.krause@uni-bielefeld.de