birdsoup

Are you invited to the Birthday Party on Friday, April 26th ? It is John James Audubon’s 228th Birthday. He has been well known for most of those years primarily as a bird artist.

I confess I don’t like his art. It does not look very natural or realistic to me. The Museum of the City of New York has a full collection of famous prints. When I looked at the originals, instead of cheap reproductions, I changed by opinion a tad. When you compensate by realizing they were done 200 years ago, I must admit they were revolutionary. But still not my favorites.

Although Audubon is best known as an artist, he was also a scientist as well advancing the study of birds. He conducted a classic experiment designed to prove whether birds find food by smell. He chose vultures for his experiment because of their preference for carrion, dead animals. Audubon hid dead goats and lambs under a cover that prevented them from being seen by birds flying overhead. The smell of the rotting meat could escape into the air. His theory was that if birds did indeed locate their food using their sense of smell they would find the carcass. They didn’t.

The conclusion was that birds don’t have a good sense of smell. He and his fellow researchers presented their results to the prestigious Royal Society. After that it become common bird lore that birds, particularly vultures, do not have a good sense of smell.
Unfortunately, Audubon was wrong. Vultures do use smell.

Just ask the gas pipeline companies in the southwest. For decades they located leaks in the pipeline by looking for vultures. The smell of the gas in the pipe oozes out of any leak and acts like a magnet attracting vultures. Dozens of vultures surround the leak.

Why did Audubon’s study show just the opposite? Scientists speculated the meat he used was just too old and rotten. Even vultures have a limited when it comes to gross food. So they duplicated Audubon’s experiment using freshly killed animals, hiding them using a sheet of plywood as a roof. The vultures found the fresh(er) meat.

Good at art, fair at science.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Audubon