From the Contact Station

Shorter, Colder Days as Winter Approaches

How does a vole or salamander taste? In October, I took a long-awaited trip back to New Jersey to visit friends I had long delayed seeing and to enjoy John Forsythe NWR and Cape May State Park for the raptor migration.  Wonderful trip. The Brigantine section of John Forsythe NWR has an 8-mile drive around large ponds.  It is among my favorite national refuges.  But I brought home a case of Covid.  I was fortunate to have a mild case (thank you to scientists who developed medicines to fight covid), but I did lose my sense of taste and smell. I kept experimenting with foods, hoping for a return of something beyond just texture in my mouth.  I plucked a fresh leaf of basil from my kitchen plant and chewed.  It came through strongly, but not exactly pleasantly, rather bitter or sharp.  Yucky.  Getting bored but feeling ok, I took an isolated drive around the refuge and began to wonder what birds taste when they eat raw, dirty, disgusting things like caterpillars, moles and voles, bullfrogs, mosquitoes, or other birds.  Do they have any ability to taste?  Do they know when they eat the ripe berries of fall there is available a pleasing sweet taste?

I dug out my old 1975 ornithology textbook by Wallace and Mahan, which said, “taste buds are scanty in birds; a few scattered over the palate……permit some taste discrimination but most birds are accustomed to bolt food items quickly….” Much of the early work on the tasting ability of birds was done on chickens.  In the 2007 ornithology book by Gill I found, “The few studies of taste acuity in birds suggests only that they may be equally or less sensitive than mammals…..”  I found out chickens have about 24 taste buds while humans have about 10,000.  Researchers had found bird taste buds do guide preferences for sweet, salt, sour and bitter and indicate some discernment in lipid and sugar concentrations.

More recently, the diversity of taste bud types across avian species has been studied and associated with adaptation to available foods and food patterns.  Significant progress has been made on how macronutrients such as carbohydrates, proteins, lipids, and calcium activate chemosensory mechanisms in the avian taste system. Sense of smell, as with us, plays a huge role in finding the right food for some species.  There is more detailed scientific information than you want to read about here, I am sure. But we can say yes; they do taste what they eat however briefly it passing those taste buds as the Great Egret gulps down the vole or lizard in the process.  I am grateful that my taste buds are in working order again and will be more appreciative of my ability to chew and savor my food as it slowly crosses my palate.   I am also very grateful to have the refuge to entertain my mind while isolating and convalescing through Covid.

A new chapeau:  Have you noticed?  Our check-in Kiosk has a new top.  The maintenance crew put a new metal roof on it.  No more showers inside the kiosk when you are trying to register your pass or pay your fee on a rainy day.  The old roof served us for a long time but the knot holes in the wood planks had fallen out and it wasn’t serving its purpose anymore.  Thank you to the maintenance crew for doing the needed fix.

Since I am on the topic of the kiosk, just as a reminder, if you have an annual or lifetime pass for entry (or a duck stamp pass, America the Beautiful pass, etc.), please DO stop at the kiosk each time you visit and fill out a green ticket with your pass number, the date and the number of visitors in your car.  Each pass covers four adults and children under 16 are free.  It helps us to keep track of visitors using the various passes.  During Covid, a lot of people purchased passes but didn’t get the information about registering with each visit so we are playing catch up.  Thanks for helping.

-Susan Setterberg, Contact Station Volunteer