Is it possible that storks learned this many many years ago, before humans cut grass, when there were larger grazing herds of animals? They associated the smell of the distress calls with easier prey and eventually learnt to rely on it to find easier prey. That's my hypothesis. Maybe someday I'll find out if I were correct.
4:15 it isn't weird at all, it's like a textbook example of Pavlovian conditioning. The storks easily learn that they have an easier time hunting in short (mowed) fields and then it's just a Pavlovian response to associate that with the smell. Then a bit of social learning and voila flocks of storks appear on freshly mowed fields.
This actually isn’t a strange phenomenon. Many plants release special odors when in distress from being eaten that will signal carnivorous insects and animals like birds that there is food for them.
@@lonestarr1490 i live in the prairies smack in the middle of canada, no sea for thousands of kilometers, and there’s so many seagulls it’s not even funny soooo seagulls can also be parkinglotgulls
@@cptntwinkletoes I'm from Germany. I used to live in the east of it and later almost in the middle of it, now I'm somewhat close to the coast. Here I do see seagulls from time to time, but rarely, because they usually keep even closer to the coast. Where I lived before, I've never seen a single seagull and I'm pretty sure nobody had. Like, if a seagull would show up in my hometown I bet life would come to a sudden halt while everyone would be just stand there, starring at the bird in utter confusion and questions would arise whether the rising of the sea happened that unexpectedly quickly and if Berlin is under water by now. But yeah, maybe they (the seagulls) behave differently in other parts of the world for whatever reason. Or they're evolving and are now trying to expand their realm.
Can confirm: there are a lot of storks on freshly mowed fields in Germany... Also, albatrosses use smell to find their way home on the open sea, which is so cool
I’d say the answer as to WHY those storks know is pretty simple: leftover programming from the ice age. When bison, aurochs, and mammoths would graze the grass, the storks would follow behind them, looking for disturbed insects, rodents, and reptiles. Just like cattles and crows in the Americas.
Also, an evolutionary adaptation to what cicadas do and other periodic mass insects such as locusting grass hoppers. The grass is telling for help from the storks to eat the insects eating them… like bioluminescent jellyfish flashing “uselessly” while attacked in the deep sea…they are fishing to attract predators of their predators.
I know, I love on the french/german frontier and there's not as many storks as there used to be. When I went to Portugal a few months ago, there were SO MANY storks there, and a local ornithologist explained that now, they don't travel up as far and sometimes don't go to africa for the winter because the climate is warmer in winter. So that might be a reason why
How do the storks know to associate the smell of cut grass with food? Probably the same way a cat knows the sound of a fridge opening does. Food is an incredibly strong motivator and creates associative memories quickly in all the animals I've ever worked with, which makes sense given it's kind of important. If you've ever been walking a dog and it's found a burger or something that someone's dropped under a bush one day, then it will check that spot every time you walk past it for some time. All it would take is for one crane to come across the food source, then maybe another one in the area sees it and goes to see if there's something worth investigating; or maybe it's passed from parent to chick. This is the sort of cultural knowledge that can make the difference between passing on your genes or not. Super cool.
Omg so true about dogs, mine would drive me absolutely nuts checking the same spot over and over again, even long after whatever goody they were looking for was gone. 🤣
Zaboomafoo taught me that turkey vultures have a great sense of smell. If you look at them from the side, you can see through both of their nostrils! This lets the air move more freely through their nose. A quick internet search tells me they can smell carrion up to a mile away. I love birds :D
Animal junction is still the place to be, even after all these years. As an expecting parent, I can’t wait to introduce my kids to Zaboo and the Kratts.
Adults really need to remember that animals aren’t stupid. They don’t have human intelligence, but they know things about finding food, shelter, mates, hospitable weather, et cetera. Also it’s not even like humans are that smart. True, we’re much smarter at our best and brightest than other types of animals are, but that tends to take decades of concerted effort and not everyone is willing or able to spend that kind of energy - especially if they don’t feel like the payoff is high enough.
I bet it was the same reason we like the smell of cutted grass Grass has been release this kind of smell and chemical since the time herbivore exist. Especially the grass forager like ungulate that mow the grassland even before human farmer For stork there was an insect, for us is the beef and mutton itself that would be abundance for hunting
Hey there, if you're wondering who one of the scientists is who published that paper... That's my Dad, Jonathan Williams who works with his team at the Max Planck Institute for "Polymerforschung" (sorry don't know the English word for it), yes this is his Google account, we don't have the same Name. If any of you have some questions about the results and experiments I can definitely ask him and reply.
I suspect that the storks originally evolved that behavior in response to the trampling of brush and grass by now-extinct species that once inhabited the same environments. For example, the aurochs, which used to be a keystone species (before being hunted to extinction), and were especially impactful for the meadows and leas their grazing and migration maintained. If the stork learned to associate the trampling of those giant ancestors to modern domestic cattle, it could have acted as a selective pressure for the development of such behavior. Of course, I'm only speculating, but it seems feasible to me.
Brains are amazing pattern recognition engines. See a pattern often enough of and it is locked in. Even is the reward is not a clear part of that. Say older Storks fly toward the fresh clippings smell for an unspecified reason. Well, that means the younger will too and given enough repeats, their brains will deduce the pattern/association and repeat it when they are older and hence propagate the pattern.
I wonder if the reason for their initial association with the cut grass/distressed plant smell is because a large amount of that smell would mean a large amount of bugs eating plants? Maybe tracking some kind of swarming bug like locusts?
At a guess, I would propose that the storks evolved the ability to smell cut or trampled grasses at a time when herds of megafauna (European Bison etc) were grazing the lowlands of Europe. As with some egrets today, following herds of big, clumsy herbivores is a good way to find the insects and rodents that are trying to avoid being trampled.
Ooh, so this particular pin's gonna be the Marabou Stork? A great representation, to be sure! They're actually one of my favorites in the stork family.
Odor thresholds for different species can be very weird. I've read that humans can detect hydrogen sulfide at concentrations lower than what dogs can detect.
I would think the smell of cut or damaged grass would historically have suggested coincidental agitation of small creatures that live in/under the grass, so they would be more available to the storks for dinner.
Is that really hard to believe? I mean yeah, it is wrong to think All birds have no sense of smell when many species absolutely do. But considering birds are heavily sight-orientated animals and yes just as many birds do have a limited sense of smell when compared to say mammals and reptiles, plus the fact that debunks the whole "Mother birds will abandon their young if they smell humans" myth; it's not that hard to believe people would think something like this is true or applies to all birds.
@@seandewar47 Yes, it is that hard to believe. All anyone has to do is look up and pay attention to birds for a few minutes to be able to tell they can smell.
@@seandewar47 is it hard to believe? No the stupidity of people shouldn’t ever be surprising. It’s amazing how some people actually function with the level of stupidity I see daily
@@user-kh8zq If you look it up online, your average Joe will get the "birds can't smell" line unless you look up certain species. As for observing birds, it's not exactly easy to notice whether a bird is smelling something as it is when a dog or a snake is smelling something, the signs are pretty subtle all things considered
Please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, PLEASE... take a breath at the end of each sentence. Or have a word with your producer. This style of video makes me hate youtube (actually, I see it's mostly channels in which you present).
In Texas, when we cut our hay, egrets do the same. They flock to our fields to feast on grasshoppers and the like. Many other birds do so as well, like our mockingbirds, whippoorwills and even crows (when no one else is around).
Storks relating the smell of cut grass with good experience finding prey is way less bizarre than Pawlow's dogs salivating at the sound of a bell their tormentor rings.
The storks thought that the human members of their community had failed twice to properly grass during that experiment, but they may have not had the resources to cut the grass themselves (at that time).
Here in Nebraska freshly tiled soil will draw in North American Robbins. They will all stand around you in a big circle waiting for you to finish so they can come in and check for food. Now I wonder if barn swallows and flycatchers are drawn in by the smell of cut grass or by the sound of a lawnmower?
The idea of birds not having a sense of smell really doesn't make sense to me when prehistoric dinosaurs (since birds are dinosaurs after all) like Tyrannosaurus rex had such advanced olfactory sections in their brains
I'm not sure what's so bizarre about them smelling this though, I can smell freshly mowed grass as well and it has nothing to do with my food. Still fun to know
Probably because it's kind of a stupid idea with daily proof that it's not true easily available to anyone who notices birds.. ever. Why anyone would have thought it is sort of inconceivable to me.
Hey, I just watched your video on locusts vs. grasshoppers. What if the storks evolved to track locust swarms that would be eating vegetation en masse, thereby causing a situation very similar to a field being mowed?
We have a similar thing with hawks and falcons on the farm I grew up on. Whenever you're doing harvest the hawks will follow the combines around waiting for mice to run away from the combines into the open areas that've been already cut.
4:22 Easy. Birds are incredibly smart. I'm a postgrad zoologist hoping to spec into ornithology, my ducks can smell when I'm making food with no other sense to clue them in. They love to beg 😂
I remember learning about Audubon's "research" he used a REALLY rotted carcas (which is too far gone for vultures to go for) and assumed "oh they can't smell". Nice sciencing "bird expert"
He had the limits of his time. 🤷♀️ If he'd had the knowledge we do, you'd probably be able to call him a genius in the field. His drawings are beautiful as well. That's interesting though, that there's a point of decay that even vultures won't eat. It actually proves that they smelled that it'd gone bad.
I just want to play devil’s advocate here and point out that I can locate freshly mown grass without a sense of smell. I have a sense of smell, but not when there’s freshly mown grass. All I have to do is wait for my nose to clog completely and my eyes to swell shut and then just trek into the wind. Easy.
Why would it be weird that storks can smell non-food things? We can. Dogs can. Cats can. What can ONLY smell its food and nothing else? THAT would be weird.
Crane's-bills, stork's-bills, geraniums, erodiums, and pelargoniums, are all mixed up and difficult to tell apart too. The common and 'Latin' names dont match between birds and flowers, but I can never remember which is which!
i have an answer for why the storks can smell fresh cut grass. Imagine when large herbivores move over grass and break it and trample it, it does the same thing as cutting, it exposes more food for the birds. BAM!!!!! give me my noble sons
Would a herd of migrating herbivores not make a similar smell as it grazes and moves? Maybe it's just that humans being the primary producer of this stink is what's really new.
Doesn't that mean we're messin' with their system? Since grass wasn't mowed until humans did what we do. It could be helping them survive, and helping them get dumber.
Why the bewilderment? You can watch bees associate various smells to a sweet syrup solution . They're very good at it at learn instantly . For me it was by placing the syrup on pine chips to ensure they wouldn't get trapped and drown in the liquid. The bees in no time were also hovering around the original pile of pine chips with no syrup 20 metres away.
Haven't even started the video yet but from the description I guarantee they're smelling insects. Every time my lawn is cut, the robins have a party in my backyard. 😂
If a storks brain can recognize the appearance of an environment that provides easy food, why not the smell of it? Not too strange. Many birds can smell fairly well, but they don't seem to use it for communication like mammals do. Maybe we are the weird ones.
Cool experiment. But I wouldn't call it weird that ANY kind of animal can smell other stuff than their food. Seeing as how the oldest and most basic forms of life seem to almost completely rely on it. To find mates or chemicals they like, and avoid those that may harm them. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any animal group that does not use this feature.
"Why would an entire branch of the tree of life just not be able to smell at all?" They say cetaceans can't smell... I think it's also been said they can't taste? Can you do a video about this?
i was under the impression plants give off distress smells to alert predators that feed on the herbivores that feed on the plants themselves no? at the scale we "damage" plants through mowing, would create opportunities to find more exposed prey, which further incentivizes storks to come.
Maybe they always knew the smell and they eventually started to associate the abundance of said smell with humans cutting their field which creates thier ideal hunting enviroment?
Isn't it just learned by experience maybe? If a stork has an easier time getting food on a field with the scent of freshly cut grass, it might associate that smell with a better chance of finding food, so more storks head to those places by association and learn about it as well
Totally makes sense. They probably know the smell from their prey who eat the grass releasing those chemicals. The more there are, the more it smells like cut grass
My mother asked me the same question when we saw some storks this summer on a mowed field.... love to learn new things and being able to send them to others so easily as well! =)
Yes it is somewhat common to see storks in germany, I often see them when driving on the highway or streets in the countryside, its quite nice and often the whole family is happy to spot them👍
Zoology is like 75% pranking the animals.
+
+
Now I want an animal behavior research journal called “curiosity pranks”
I’d love to think there was a stork scientist taking notes on the humans strange grass cutting habits that day.
In the words of Adam Savage: "the only difference between messing around and science is writing it down."
Is it possible that storks learned this many many years ago, before humans cut grass, when there were larger grazing herds of animals? They associated the smell of the distress calls with easier prey and eventually learnt to rely on it to find easier prey. That's my hypothesis. Maybe someday I'll find out if I were correct.
They learned the smell of cut grass means easier food the same way Pavlov’s dogs learned that the bell means dinner.
4:15 it isn't weird at all, it's like a textbook example of Pavlovian conditioning. The storks easily learn that they have an easier time hunting in short (mowed) fields and then it's just a Pavlovian response to associate that with the smell. Then a bit of social learning and voila flocks of storks appear on freshly mowed fields.
This actually isn’t a strange phenomenon. Many plants release special odors when in distress from being eaten that will signal carnivorous insects and animals like birds that there is food for them.
I’m excited for my pin
Interesting stuff
Hankverse
I thought it was going to be babies.
🐦
Scents sense,, if you will
New, from the makers of DUCK,DUCK,GOOSE,it's STORK, HERON, CRANE! It's hours of educational yet confusing fun.
And all three of them are the 'it' name.
@@JoshKnoxChinnery STORK!!!
That sounds like a fun game
@@soupdujour4086 when you get to heron, you stuff a live salmon in your mouth and then fly away.
If I throw some left over fish in my garden, within minutes a seagull or 2 show up. So yeah they can smell!
But you live close to the sea, right? Not somewhere up in the mountains or something (because THAT would be bizarre).
@@lonestarr1490 I live 76km (bird's eye view) from the ocean. But there is a big river very close.
@@lonestarr1490 i live in the prairies smack in the middle of canada, no sea for thousands of kilometers, and there’s so many seagulls it’s not even funny soooo seagulls can also be parkinglotgulls
@@lonestarr1490 Not sure where you're from but in Australia seagulls are often found very far from the sea!
@@cptntwinkletoes I'm from Germany. I used to live in the east of it and later almost in the middle of it, now I'm somewhat close to the coast. Here I do see seagulls from time to time, but rarely, because they usually keep even closer to the coast. Where I lived before, I've never seen a single seagull and I'm pretty sure nobody had. Like, if a seagull would show up in my hometown I bet life would come to a sudden halt while everyone would be just stand there, starring at the bird in utter confusion and questions would arise whether the rising of the sea happened that unexpectedly quickly and if Berlin is under water by now.
But yeah, maybe they (the seagulls) behave differently in other parts of the world for whatever reason. Or they're evolving and are now trying to expand their realm.
Can confirm: there are a lot of storks on freshly mowed fields in Germany...
Also, albatrosses use smell to find their way home on the open sea, which is so cool
I’d say the answer as to WHY those storks know is pretty simple: leftover programming from the ice age. When bison, aurochs, and mammoths would graze the grass, the storks would follow behind them, looking for disturbed insects, rodents, and reptiles. Just like cattles and crows in the Americas.
There are plants that also release scents in the air when being attacked that signal carnivorous insects and birds that their is food for them.
I don’t get the mystery. If the restaurants you frequent happen to smell like freshly cut grass, you quickly learn to just smell for grass.
Also, an evolutionary adaptation to what cicadas do and other periodic mass insects such as locusting grass hoppers. The grass is telling for help from the storks to eat the insects eating them… like bioluminescent jellyfish flashing “uselessly” while attacked in the deep sea…they are fishing to attract predators of their predators.
Not too long ago storks had declined quite a bit here in Germany, but nowadays there a bit more of a common sight again
pesticides?
I know, I love on the french/german frontier and there's not as many storks as there used to be. When I went to Portugal a few months ago, there were SO MANY storks there, and a local ornithologist explained that now, they don't travel up as far and sometimes don't go to africa for the winter because the climate is warmer in winter. So that might be a reason why
@@bbbb95476 combination of pesticided and habitad loss becouse of intensive agriculture
How do the storks know to associate the smell of cut grass with food? Probably the same way a cat knows the sound of a fridge opening does. Food is an incredibly strong motivator and creates associative memories quickly in all the animals I've ever worked with, which makes sense given it's kind of important. If you've ever been walking a dog and it's found a burger or something that someone's dropped under a bush one day, then it will check that spot every time you walk past it for some time. All it would take is for one crane to come across the food source, then maybe another one in the area sees it and goes to see if there's something worth investigating; or maybe it's passed from parent to chick. This is the sort of cultural knowledge that can make the difference between passing on your genes or not. Super cool.
Omg so true about dogs, mine would drive me absolutely nuts checking the same spot over and over again, even long after whatever goody they were looking for was gone. 🤣
Zaboomafoo taught me that turkey vultures have a great sense of smell. If you look at them from the side, you can see through both of their nostrils! This lets the air move more freely through their nose. A quick internet search tells me they can smell carrion up to a mile away. I love birds :D
I used to watch Zaboo with my kids when they were little. I think I enjoyed it more than they did🤔
Leap, leap...
I read somewhere once that turkey vultures can also smell leaks in natural gas lines, because the additives added to the gas smell like carrion.
R.I.P. to the Zabu homie
Gullah gullah island! Gullah gullah!
Animal junction is still the place to be, even after all these years. As an expecting parent, I can’t wait to introduce my kids to Zaboo and the Kratts.
I love that it was a kid who asked the question
Adults really need to remember that animals aren’t stupid. They don’t have human intelligence, but they know things about finding food, shelter, mates, hospitable weather, et cetera.
Also it’s not even like humans are that smart. True, we’re much smarter at our best and brightest than other types of animals are, but that tends to take decades of concerted effort and not everyone is willing or able to spend that kind of energy - especially if they don’t feel like the payoff is high enough.
*Sees greater adjutant
...Okay, maybe a wattle on a non-avian dinosaur wouldn't look so silly.
I bet it was the same reason we like the smell of cutted grass
Grass has been release this kind of smell and chemical since the time herbivore exist. Especially the grass forager like ungulate that mow the grassland even before human farmer
For stork there was an insect, for us is the beef and mutton itself that would be abundance for hunting
Very interesting theory! I wonder if there was some sort of correlation between agriculture and the evolution of this trait in some species.
Lots of people dislike the odor of cut grass.
Not if you suffer from hay fever .
Ooh! Another bizarre beast! Can you do a video on hyenas?
Yes yes!!! I LOOOOVE THEM!!!!😍
Yes I'd love a yeen video
@whatever oliver cookie cutter shark
@whatever oliver I'd love to see one on Clouded Leopards. Such interesting critters! Also greenland sharks would be cool!
Hey there, if you're wondering who one of the scientists is who published that paper...
That's my Dad, Jonathan Williams who works with his team at the Max Planck Institute for "Polymerforschung" (sorry don't know the English word for it), yes this is his Google account, we don't have the same Name. If any of you have some questions about the results and experiments I can definitely ask him and reply.
So cool!!
How did a polymer scientist end up doing zoology research?
I suspect that the storks originally evolved that behavior in response to the trampling of brush and grass by now-extinct species that once inhabited the same environments. For example, the aurochs, which used to be a keystone species (before being hunted to extinction), and were especially impactful for the meadows and leas their grazing and migration maintained. If the stork learned to associate the trampling of those giant ancestors to modern domestic cattle, it could have acted as a selective pressure for the development of such behavior. Of course, I'm only speculating, but it seems feasible to me.
Brains are amazing pattern recognition engines. See a pattern often enough of and it is locked in. Even is the reward is not a clear part of that. Say older Storks fly toward the fresh clippings smell for an unspecified reason. Well, that means the younger will too and given enough repeats, their brains will deduce the pattern/association and repeat it when they are older and hence propagate the pattern.
0:59 Those are the most beautiful cat eye liner wings I’ve ever seen, and they just wake up like this.
I wonder if the reason for their initial association with the cut grass/distressed plant smell is because a large amount of that smell would mean a large amount of bugs eating plants? Maybe tracking some kind of swarming bug like locusts?
Amphisbaena are wonderful bizarre beasts that look like snakes but aren't!
At a guess, I would propose that the storks evolved the ability to smell cut or trampled grasses at a time when herds of megafauna (European Bison etc) were grazing the lowlands of Europe.
As with some egrets today, following herds of big, clumsy herbivores is a good way to find the insects and rodents that are trying to avoid being trampled.
Ooh, so this particular pin's gonna be the Marabou Stork? A great representation, to be sure! They're actually one of my favorites in the stork family.
Odor thresholds for different species can be very weird. I've read that humans can detect hydrogen sulfide at concentrations lower than what dogs can detect.
I would think the smell of cut or damaged grass would historically have suggested coincidental agitation of small creatures that live in/under the grass, so they would be more available to the storks for dinner.
Wait people think birds can’t smell….?
Left to their own devices, people use to come up with some outlandish ideas from time to time (or, presumably, more often than not).
Is that really hard to believe? I mean yeah, it is wrong to think All birds have no sense of smell when many species absolutely do. But considering birds are heavily sight-orientated animals and yes just as many birds do have a limited sense of smell when compared to say mammals and reptiles, plus the fact that debunks the whole "Mother birds will abandon their young if they smell humans" myth; it's not that hard to believe people would think something like this is true or applies to all birds.
@@seandewar47 Yes, it is that hard to believe. All anyone has to do is look up and pay attention to birds for a few minutes to be able to tell they can smell.
@@seandewar47 is it hard to believe? No the stupidity of people shouldn’t ever be surprising. It’s amazing how some people actually function with the level of stupidity I see daily
@@user-kh8zq If you look it up online, your average Joe will get the "birds can't smell" line unless you look up certain species. As for observing birds, it's not exactly easy to notice whether a bird is smelling something as it is when a dog or a snake is smelling something, the signs are pretty subtle all things considered
Please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, PLEASE... take a breath at the end of each sentence. Or have a word with your producer. This style of video makes me hate youtube (actually, I see it's mostly channels in which you present).
In Texas, when we cut our hay, egrets do the same. They flock to our fields to feast on grasshoppers and the like.
Many other birds do so as well, like our mockingbirds, whippoorwills and even crows (when no one else is around).
Storks relating the smell of cut grass with good experience finding prey is way less bizarre than Pawlow's dogs salivating at the sound of a bell their tormentor rings.
Here in Florida. Mow the lawn and cow birds show up. They walk around and get the bugs.
The storks thought that the human members of their community had failed twice to properly grass during that experiment, but they may have not had the resources to cut the grass themselves (at that time).
Here in Nebraska freshly tiled soil will draw in North American Robbins. They will all stand around you in a big circle waiting for you to finish so they can come in and check for food. Now I wonder if barn swallows and flycatchers are drawn in by the smell of cut grass or by the sound of a lawnmower?
The idea of birds not having a sense of smell really doesn't make sense to me when prehistoric dinosaurs (since birds are dinosaurs after all) like Tyrannosaurus rex had such advanced olfactory sections in their brains
I'm not sure what's so bizarre about them smelling this though, I can smell freshly mowed grass as well and it has nothing to do with my food. Still fun to know
Is the naked head part of eating carrion? Like maybe it avoids getting any of the putrifying microbes trapped in their feathers when they eat?
How are the efforts to decrease maternal mortality in Sierra Leone going?
The new health center broke ground this past April! th-cam.com/video/RN68qKBttgQ/w-d-xo.html
Stork, heron, crane, crane, stork, stork, heron, llama, llama duck!
hm, I never thought of birds not being able to smell...
Probably because it's kind of a stupid idea with daily proof that it's not true easily available to anyone who notices birds.. ever. Why anyone would have thought it is sort of inconceivable to me.
Still waiting on an episode about pelicans. 😂
So is Hank 😔
We can smell cut grass too, and we don't eat it. Doesn't seem weird to me.
Storks and herons are unclean, cranes are clean. But are rails clean or not?
My chickens can smell bugs and hidden seeds. I learned from observing
Hey, I just watched your video on locusts vs. grasshoppers. What if the storks evolved to track locust swarms that would be eating vegetation en masse, thereby causing a situation very similar to a field being mowed?
I love it!
Obviously they can, have you never been to a house with birds in? Worse than cat homes
All these birds really do look like dinosaurs. lol
what differs storks from herons?
We have a similar thing with hawks and falcons on the farm I grew up on. Whenever you're doing harvest the hawks will follow the combines around waiting for mice to run away from the combines into the open areas that've been already cut.
4:22 Easy. Birds are incredibly smart. I'm a postgrad zoologist hoping to spec into ornithology, my ducks can smell when I'm making food with no other sense to clue them in. They love to beg 😂
I remember learning about Audubon's "research" he used a REALLY rotted carcas (which is too far gone for vultures to go for) and assumed "oh they can't smell". Nice sciencing "bird expert"
He had the limits of his time. 🤷♀️ If he'd had the knowledge we do, you'd probably be able to call him a genius in the field. His drawings are beautiful as well.
That's interesting though, that there's a point of decay that even vultures won't eat. It actually proves that they smelled that it'd gone bad.
I just want to play devil’s advocate here and point out that I can locate freshly mown grass without a sense of smell. I have a sense of smell, but not when there’s freshly mown grass.
All I have to do is wait for my nose to clog completely and my eyes to swell shut and then just trek into the wind. Easy.
Why would it be weird that storks can smell non-food things? We can. Dogs can. Cats can. What can ONLY smell its food and nothing else? THAT would be weird.
Crane's-bills, stork's-bills, geraniums, erodiums, and pelargoniums, are all mixed up and difficult to tell apart too. The common and 'Latin' names dont match between birds and flowers, but I can never remember which is which!
i have an answer for why the storks can smell fresh cut grass. Imagine when large herbivores move over grass and break it and trample it, it does the same thing as cutting, it exposes more food for the birds. BAM!!!!! give me my noble sons
it's also all the chopped up little animals in the hay fields after the mower goes thru. It's a grisly buffet.
I know which birds have an especially good sense of smell, but which can’t?
Would a herd of migrating herbivores not make a similar smell as it grazes and moves? Maybe it's just that humans being the primary producer of this stink is what's really new.
Doesn't that mean we're messin' with their system?
Since grass wasn't mowed until humans did what we do. It could be helping them survive, and helping them get dumber.
Wow!
They can totally smell cut grass!
That is awesome!
Why the bewilderment? You can watch bees associate various smells to a sweet syrup solution . They're very good at it at learn instantly . For me it was by placing the syrup on pine chips to ensure they wouldn't get trapped and drown in the liquid. The bees in no time were also hovering around the original pile of pine chips with no syrup 20 metres away.
I'm a bug Marabou Stork fan. My man looks wild. They eat elephants
Haven't even started the video yet but from the description I guarantee they're smelling insects. Every time my lawn is cut, the robins have a party in my backyard. 😂
If a storks brain can recognize the appearance of an environment that provides easy food, why not the smell of it? Not too strange. Many birds can smell fairly well, but they don't seem to use it for communication like mammals do. Maybe we are the weird ones.
Cool experiment. But I wouldn't call it weird that ANY kind of animal can smell other stuff than their food. Seeing as how the oldest and most basic forms of life seem to almost completely rely on it. To find mates or chemicals they like, and avoid those that may harm them. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any animal group that does not use this feature.
"Bizarre Beasts Sukcs".. come on Hank, don't be so harsh to your work...
Idk if some animals can smell better than others, but some definitely smell worse! XD XD XD
"Why would an entire branch of the tree of life just not be able to smell at all?"
They say cetaceans can't smell... I think it's also been said they can't taste? Can you do a video about this?
i was under the impression plants give off distress smells to alert predators that feed on the herbivores that feed on the plants themselves no? at the scale we "damage" plants through mowing, would create opportunities to find more exposed prey, which further incentivizes storks to come.
As a Pole I consider White Stork our national bird and they bring me huge amounts of joy ech year.
maybe they follow the big herbivores like robins do with pigs disrupting the biotope of the prai sounding the dinner bell.
Maybe they always knew the smell and they eventually started to associate the abundance of said smell with humans
cutting their field which creates thier ideal hunting enviroment?
A video on salamanderfish would be cool. (Lepidogalaxias salamandroides)
Isn't it just learned by experience maybe? If a stork has an easier time getting food on a field with the scent of freshly cut grass, it might associate that smell with a better chance of finding food, so more storks head to those places by association and learn about it as well
Maybe there’s been coevolution since people have been harvesting hay for centuries?
Who doesn't gravitate towards cut grass.
Such a wonderful scent
the issue is once they get an idea on how something works they stop thinking about it. you may know how it works but should ask how else could it work
I have never heard of any birds having a poor sense of smell.
Most birds can smell their prey
Cassowaries *can smell your fear*
im confused, if only 3 storks showed up, does that not suggest they mainly rely on another sense?
or did i misread the result,,
If FLIES can smell, birds MUST be able to!
The same people who thought birds couldn’t smell, are also the same people who thought the world was flat
they have nostrils on their beaks why I assumed they would smell never heard anyone say they couldnt.
Totally makes sense. They probably know the smell from their prey who eat the grass releasing those chemicals. The more there are, the more it smells like cut grass
This is very cool, but I don't think it's bizarre, it doesn't even strike me as all that odd
I never thought it claimed they couldn’t smell at all. Just that they can’t smell well or as well as other things overall.
Every Marabou stork looks like Bernie Sanders.
But where do children think babies come from before anyone tells them the truth or fiction?
Whoa wasn't expecting Hank to be hosting this, is this another channel of his?
You missed the opportunity to put pelican in that stork crane stork store pelican!
My mother asked me the same question when we saw some storks this summer on a mowed field.... love to learn new things and being able to send them to others so easily as well! =)
The weird things storks can smell:
- fear
My favorite part of the scientific method is when we learn how wrong we were. 😊
* watching videos on auto next *
* start to heard Hawk's voice *
"Wait, that's not SciShow!"
kkk just another unexpected meet with the great guy.
Yes it is somewhat common to see storks in germany, I often see them when driving on the highway or streets in the countryside, its quite nice and often the whole family is happy to spot them👍