Can Birds Smell Food. Therefore the species which can detect are hardly a few. The answer is yes birds can smell.
Either way its safe to assume that the feeder birds you see in your backyard are not relying on whatever sense of smell they may have to find the bird seed you have left out for them. Birds do not use smell to locate. But these are the exceptions.
But not all calls at a food source are altruistic.
Foraging for food can involve sight hearing and even smell. Birds possess olfactory glands but theyre not well developed in most. The answer is yes birds can smell. But albatrosses big sea birds that can have wingspans around ten feet have been known to sniff out food from even greater distancesabout 12 miles away.
