One of the general features associated with specialised hummingbird-pollinated flowers in the New World is that they often have no scent perceptible to the human nose. This is then interpreted as evidence that hummingbirds have no sense of smell, which strikes me as circular reasoning at best. This “fact” is then frequently repeated in text books and on the web, for example at the Bird Watcher’s Digest site, at The Spruce site, and at the World of Hummingbirds.
However I know of only two research papers that have tested whether or not hummingbirds can smell, both of them short notes; and in both cases they found that the hummingbirds they tested could associate scents with food in artificial flowers. Those studies (with links to the originals) are:
It surprises me that this has been so little studied, given how much research has otherwise been done on hummingbirds. Have I missed any other studies? Clearly vision is more important for hummingbirds when locating food, but that’s not the same as stating that hummingbirds have no sense of smell. Seems to be one of those myths that won’t go away, of which there are many in pollination biology.
Comments welcomed, as always.
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I live in B.C. Canada. May 16-19 2020 , my family and I were camping fairly deeply in the bush. There were no flowering bushes , plants or wild flowers in the surrounding pine and fir forest. I put up a hummingbird feeder and within 2 hours a hummingbird came and fed. By the end of 3 days there was 4 birds. I felt sure they must have an extremely sensitive sense of smell otherwise how did they find. our feeder. So I was quite surprised to read that the thought was they had no sense of smell…..
Interesting
Sharon Marano
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Thanks Sharon, that’s really interesting. Still lots that we don;t know about even these very familiar birds!
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I just saw a hummingbird go to one of my trees that has been recently holed by a wood pecker. The sap is dripping out of the holes in the trunk, but it is otherwise not a place that would be energy profitable to look for nutrients. That’s what got me searching and brought me to this post. I think they must have smelled the sap, otherwise their eyesight is incredible.
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Thanks Kris, that’s really interesting. That’s a lot we don’t understand about even these very familiar and well-studied birds.
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