RE: Apology to Tim Williams

[Tim Williams <twilliams_alpha@hotmail.com>]

Richard Cowen wrote:

> I wanted to apologise for a couple of posts in which I commented on  Tim 
> Williams' posts without
> reading them carefully enough. AFAIK, everything Tim said about sense  of 
> smell in New World vultures is correct.

Hey, no problem.   I'm glad to hear that you have more faith in my posts 
than I do.  ;-)

As a further addition to this thread... apparently pipeline engineers make 
use of the excellent olfactory abilities of turkey vultures by injecting 
ethyl mercaptan into pipes and following the birds to the leak.  Ethyl 
mercaptan has a very distinctive and very bad smell, similar to carrion.

The birds that are thought to have the best sense of smell are the kiwis, 
which have huge olfactory lobes.  Not for scavenging, but for probing.

Cheers

Tim