This is Bird Note.

When biologist Danielle Whitaker started studying bird odors,

some scientists tried to discourage her.

They repeated an old myth.

Birds can't smell.

But that only deepened her curiosity.

When I first heard the idea that birds didn't have a sense of smell, they suddenly became this mysterious puzzle I had to study.

She was drawn further into the world of birds scent

when she caught a whiff of her favorite bird, the brown-headed cowbird.

The first time I caught a brown-headed cowbird,

I had it in a paper bag the way we hold

captive birds and when I opened that bag it just smelled like fresh cookies and I

couldn't believe it I took the bird out and I sniffed that bird and it was it was

like a sugar cookie.

And every cowbird I've caught since then

smells like cookies to me.

Danielle and her colleagues studied dark-eyed junkos and found that these birds produce many odors during the breeding season.

Linked to the bird's sex hormones, these odors help signal readiness to mate and how aggressive an individual is.

There were a number of us who finally started looking at behavior and birds and finally started to see that they were using odor.

It really started to raise awareness in the scientific community that hey this is actually

something birds can do.

Learn more and Daniel Whitaker's new book, The Secret Perfume of Birds,

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