article thumbnail

Getting the Bill – Taste, Touch and Smell in Birds

10,000 Birds

Sword-billed Hummingbird , Colombia Bills come in all shapes and sizes. Birds use rectal bristles (at the base of the bill) and tiny touch factories called Herbst corpuscles to detect touch. But how birds use these different senses, like the diversity in bill size and shape, varies almost as much from species to species.

Birds 221