Be A Better Naturalist: Bear Sense

The unique shape of a bear’s nose, sort of like a comma laying on its side, is purpose built for creating a vortex of air in front of the nose that supplies a continuous stream of smell laden air into the nostrils even while exhaling. Brown bear swimming through an estuary, British Columbia, CA.

When it comes to the sense of smell, bears, especially brown bears, reign supreme. From their extraordinarily complex noses to the structures of their brains, everything about these animals is geared toward creating a three-dimensional map of the world around them through the sense of smell.

It’s challenging to try and quantify exactly how much stronger an animal’s sense of smell is compared to ours as there are many different factors that come into play. Sure, there are olfactory receptors that we can count. But an animal’s ability to experience the world through the sense of smell is far more complicated than just the number of receptors they have.

Both bears and canines, for instance, have uniquely shaped nostrils that are purpose built for experiencing the world through the sense of smell. Looking closely at your dog’s nose, you will notice the slits on either side, making those nostrils look like commas on their side. This unique design creates a swirl of air in front of their noses and brings in a constant stream of air and scents to their olfactory receptors even when they are exhaling. Even if humans had the same number of olfactory receptors as a dog, we still wouldn’t be able to do what they do because the physiology of our nose is so different. Nor would the neurology of our brains be capable of processing all that information either. If you ever fall down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out how much more powerful a dog’s nose is to yours, you will find that claims vary wildly for these reasons. The hardware these animals are working with is so different than ours.

But sometimes numbers make things easier to understand. So, to put all of this into perspective, your average dog has around 100 times the number of olfactory receptors as humans. Bloodhounds, a breed purpose built for their sense of smell, have around 300 times the number of olfactory receptors as we do. But because of how different their physiology is, and how their noses and brains have evolved to receive and process all that information, most researchers say that a dog’s sense of smell is anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 times better than humans.  

As for brown bears, they have 7 times more olfactory receptors than even a bloodhound does.

But again, there is more than meets the eye here. It’s not just the number of receptors (bears have literally billions). It’s also the structure of their noses and brains as well. And with a brown bear’s brain, the size of their two olfactory lobes are in a class all by themselves which are both about the size of your thumb (yours is about the size of the tip of a pencil eraser).

All of this has lead researchers to believe that bears are able to literally create three-dimensional maps of their entire world based upon smell.

I can’t even imagine!

We often find that with portraits of brown bears we have created, it appears that their eyes and noses are going in opposite directions. It’s a myth that bears have poor eyesight. In fact, their eyesight is similar to our with only a slight difference in the perception of color. As for the power of their noses, however, this is second to none in nature. For this reason, we often find their eyes and their noses pointed in different directions a they are taking in and processing as much information about their world as possible from both senses.

But what does any of this have to do with wildlife photography?

While us humans have a better sense of smell than we typically like to give ourselves credit for, more often than not we give little thought to smell when we step outdoors.

Part of the problem of being us is that we assume that the rest of the world experiences life on Earth just like us. We have some of the best vision in the world and expect animals see what we see. We live in hyper noise filled communities and take our conversations and decibels into the field with us. And we cover ourselves in colognes and perfumes and deodorants and shampoos and detergents and a hundred thousand other chemical smells that we barely notice, if at all, but register like a shotgun blast in the forest to other animals.

All of it would be a bit like walking down a trail in the woods when suddenly you spot a large and unknown animal a long distance off, glowing like a giant neon sign in the dark. Every animal in the forest notices as well. This is not normal. This is completely outside the boundaries of our known universe. I don’t know about you, but a being wandering through the woods glowing in the dark is going to result in me running for my life. I like my X-Files confined to the television thank you very much.

In the 19th century, the German biologist, Jakob von Uexküll, coined the term Umwelt to describe how that animals all have different sensory experiences of the world. Natural Selection has shaped us all to have our own “superpowers” for survival through the ways in which we sense the world around us.

Pit vipers, for instance, have what is likely thermal imaging overlaid with their normal vision and when they inject an animal with their venom, they can taste the chemical trail of their deadly cocktail of proteins to follow their soon to be meal until it succumbs to the venom.

I can’t do this.

I don’t see or taste the world this way and have no conceivable means of understanding what it must be like to experience life like this, or how it would everything about how one would think and behave in the world.

Nor does that pit viper have anyway to wrap their minds around what it must be like be human, to see a million different hues of color and have the visual resolution to pick out the pattern in an animal’s fur that even that animal cannot see, and do it all from a long distance away, while driving a vehicle, sipping espresso, and listening to compositions by Ludovico Einaudi.

This is the concept of Umwelt (pronounced um-velt).

All life is subjective; all experiences are shaped by the hardware we evolved to wield.

As wildlife photographers, we must be mindful of this. In a national park, animals stand around on the side of the road because they are so inundated by us to have become habituated to us and our noise and our smells. Maybe they are just too stoned from the carbon monoxide of our vehicles to care, which is another possibility. Either way, outside of these very specific situations however, animals are weary of all the other stuff we bring into their world. Different often equates to danger.

Noise works like concentric waves on the water. Small noises equate to small waves. Loud noises are like big waves, driving everything away. I wrote about this at length in my series of articles titled, Zen and the Art of Finding Wildlife.   

But smell is no different. And it’s important to understand you and I cannot even begin to imagine how attuned to smell some animals are, how powerful and profound that sensory experience is to them.

While we can never begin to understand what the Umvelt of another animal must be like, what a three-dimensional smellscape must be like, we can at least try and then adjust our behaviors accordingly. And when we do this, our success as wildlife photographers will grow along with the depths of our own experiences in the natural world.

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