![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/red-tailed-hawk-0789-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"red-tailed-hawk-0789-ron-dudley\\"")
<\/p>\nOr the lack thereof…<\/p>\n
Two days ago I encountered this juvenile Red-tailed Hawk on an unlikely and\u00a0extremely foul-smelling perch. The photos are dark because the entire area was still in the\u00a0dense\u00a0shade of a nearby mountain. I was shooting at ISO 2000 in the last two photos\u00a0if that tells you anything about the lighting conditions.<\/p>\n
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The hawk was perched on\u00a0the vent stack of an outhouse in Little Emigration Canyon. Now let me tell you a little about this particular outhouse.<\/p>\n
It has to be the most evil-smelling public outhouse in the\u00a0entire state of Utah and I mean that! It always smells like it’s been used and abused and never\u00a0mucked out for a hundred years. Several times this summer I tried to photograph small birds in some bushes next to a stream just out of view to the left but even though I was probably parked about 60′ away from it the damn thing smelled so bad at that distance that sometimes I had to leave. I can even smell it from the approach\u00a0road above the outhouse from a couple of hundred feet away.<\/p>\n
Other outhouses in the area and elsewhere don’t smell nearly this bad and in my opinion the Utah Department of Natural Resources should be ashamed of themselves for such piss-poor maintenance (bad pun intended). We always<\/em> pass this outhouse up and if we need to we use another one elsewhere in the canyon.<\/p>\n So, what do you think it\u00a0would smell\u00a0like with your head directly over the vent pipe opening like this hawk had ‘his’ head?\u00a0(I don’t really\u00a0know\u00a0the\u00a0sex of the hawk and I\u00a0wish he had turned his head this way for the photo). I simply can’t imagine the stink!<\/p>\n Which begs the question, how well do birds smell odors? The answer depends on who you talk to and the kind of bird\u00a0involved but overall it’s a long-debated question with very few clear answers except that\u00a0many birds probably don’t have highly developed senses of smell. A short summary on the subject\u00a0from Stanford University can be found here<\/a> if you have the interest.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n But I simply can’t imagine how this hawk, if it had any significant sense of\u00a0smell at all, could stand the stench for as long as it did (I saw it land here and it was still there when I left the area nine minutes later). That pipe is coming directly from the toilet vault and it makes my eyes burn just to think about what it had to smell like like up there.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n But the hawk seemed to revel in it. Here it almost looks like he’s using the fumes as aroma therapy (though he was\u00a0actually\u00a0just turning on the perch). After he turned I left the area, I just couldn’t stand watching him suffer the stench.<\/p>\n Of course I’m aware that many animals with an excellent sense of smell don’t seem to be bothered by truly disgusting stinks (polar bears on ripe whale carcasses come to mind but there are many other examples). And my title was just a little tongue in cheek, I don’t really see this observation as reliable evidence either way.<\/p>\n But my tongue wasn’t in my cheek very far…<\/p>\n Ron<\/p>\n Note: It isn’t unusual for small birds to fall down these vent pipes and become trapped in the stinky muck below so many of our\u00a0public outhouses have now had vent screens installed inside the tops of the pipes to prevent it.\u00a0More here<\/a> if you’re interested.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Or the lack thereof…![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/red-tailed-hawk-0327-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"red-tailed-hawk-0327-ron-dudley\\"")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/red-tailed-hawk-0346-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"red-tailed-hawk-0346-ron-dudley\\"")
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\nTwo days ago I encountered this juvenile Red-tailed Hawk on an unlikely and extremely foul-smelling perch.<\/p>\n