Ravens can smell, and they appear to use scent to find food. For decades, scientists assumed most birds had little to no sense of smell, but controlled experiments with common ravens have shown they can sniff out hidden food using odor alone. Their sense of smell isn’t their sharpest tool compared to vision and hearing, but it’s more functional than most people expect.
Why People Thought Birds Couldn’t Smell
The idea that birds are essentially “smell-blind” persisted in science until surprisingly recently. Unlike mammals, which visibly sniff the air, extend their necks, track scent trails, and mark territory with odor, birds don’t display obvious sniffing behaviors. They also evolved an incredibly rich set of alternative senses: excellent color vision extending into the ultraviolet range, complex songs, bright plumage, and elaborate courtship displays. With all of that sensory firepower, researchers reasoned that smell simply wasn’t part of the picture.
A few exceptions were acknowledged early on. Kiwis, which are nocturnal and nearly blind, were shown in the 1960s and 70s to locate food underground by smell. Turkey vultures famously track carrion from kilometers away by detecting the chemicals released by decaying flesh. But these species were treated as outliers. The assumption that most birds, including intelligent species like ravens, had no meaningful sense of smell went largely unchallenged for a long time.
That assumption turned out to be wrong. Anatomical, physiological, and behavioral research has since demonstrated that birds in general have a functional olfactory system structurally similar to that of other vertebrates. The question for any given species isn’t really whether it can smell, but how well and how much it relies on scent compared to its other senses.
What Experiments Showed About Ravens
The most direct evidence comes from a set of four experiments testing captive juvenile common ravens (five males and three females) on their ability to find hidden food using scent as the only available cue. Researchers buried fresh ground fish under gravel and presented the ravens with paired containers, only one of which held food. The birds couldn’t see or touch the food, so any success had to come from detecting its odor.
The ravens performed well across every variation. They reliably picked the correct container when food was buried under 2 centimeters of gravel. They could detect food concealed under as much as 2.5 centimeters. And they located quantities as small as 1 gram of food hidden beneath 1.5 centimeters of gravel. That’s a tiny amount of fish buried under a layer of stone, detected by smell alone. These results are consistent with ravens having a genuinely useful sense of smell, not just a vestigial one.
Raven Brain Anatomy and Smell
The part of the brain that processes smell, called the olfactory bulb, varies enormously across bird species. Across all birds studied, olfactory bulb volume ranges from 0.06 cubic millimeters in small species like the spotted pardalote to over 217 cubic millimeters in emus. That’s a 3,627-fold difference, far greater than the 260-fold range in total brain size. In other words, some birds have invested far more neural real estate in smell than others.
Corvids as a group, including ravens, crows, and jays, fall on the smaller end of this spectrum relative to their brain size. Ancestral corvids likely had relatively small olfactory bulbs. This doesn’t mean ravens can’t smell. It means smell plays a supporting role rather than a leading one. Ravens rely primarily on their exceptional vision and cognitive abilities to find food, solve problems, and navigate their environment. Smell supplements those primary senses rather than replacing them.
For comparison, the birds with the largest olfactory structures relative to brain size tend to be species that depend heavily on scent for survival: seabirds like albatrosses and petrels that track fish oil slicks across open ocean, kiwis that root for invertebrates in the dark, and vultures that locate carcasses from the air. Ravens don’t need that level of olfactory power, but their equipment is functional enough to give them an edge when visual cues aren’t available.
How Ravens Actually Use Smell
Ravens are opportunistic scavengers and predators. They eat carrion, insects, small animals, eggs, fruit, garbage, and just about anything else they can find. In the wild, they locate most food visually. They watch other animals, spot movement, and scan the landscape from elevated perches or in flight. Their intelligence also plays a role: they remember food caches, follow predators to kills, and observe other ravens to find resources.
Smell likely matters most when visual cues fall short. A carcass hidden under snow, food cached beneath leaf litter, or something buried by another animal could all produce scent cues that a raven picks up on while foraging at close range. The experimental evidence suggests ravens are capable of this kind of short-range scent detection. No published data currently pins down the maximum distance at which a raven can detect food by smell in the wild, but the lab results point to a functional ability at close quarters rather than the long-range scent tracking seen in vultures.
How Ravens Compare to Other Birds
Among the bird world’s best smellers, ravens are middle-of-the-pack at best. Turkey vultures can detect the chemical signature of rotting meat from several kilometers away and will approach hidden carcasses by flying upwind. Kiwis have nostrils at the tip of their bill and probe soil to find worms and grubs entirely by smell. Tube-nosed seabirds like petrels and shearwaters navigate vast stretches of ocean using airborne chemical gradients.
Among corvids specifically, ravens have not been shown to be dramatically different from their relatives. The ancestral corvid lineage had relatively small olfactory structures, and modern corvids share a broadly similar brain architecture. What sets ravens apart within their family is body size (they’re the largest songbirds in the world) and the cognitive flexibility that comes with their large brains overall. Their scavenging lifestyle, which regularly involves locating hidden or decaying food, may give them slightly more reason to use smell than a jay or magpie that feeds primarily on visible food sources, but direct species-to-species comparisons within corvids remain limited.
The bottom line: ravens can smell, they do use scent to find food, and their olfactory system is fully functional. It’s just not their strongest sense. They’re visual and cognitive powerhouses first, with a nose that fills in the gaps when eyes and brains aren’t enough.