Do Birds Have Ears? Where They Are and How Birds Hear
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Yes, birds have ears. They just skip the part you’d recognize. A bird’s ear is a small opening on each side of its head, just behind and slightly below the eye, hidden under a patch of feathers called the ear coverts, or auriculars.
No bird has ear flaps. Instead, the head’s own shape changes each sound just enough to tell a bird whether it came from above or below, and owls add dish-shaped faces that funnel sound to their ears.
In lab tests, birds catch timing details inside a sound that people miss, and the ones studied so far regrow the inner-ear cells loud noise destroys. Where you beat them is pitch, telling two close notes apart.
Where are birds’ ears located?
Just behind the eye and a little below it, one on each side of the head.
Each ear is a plain opening with no flap or shell built up around it, nothing you’d mistake for a dog’s ear or your own.
Why can’t you see them? Feathers.
A patch of them lies over each opening, so even a bird sitting still on your feeder shows no sign of an ear.
Next time one holds still for you, check the spot behind and slightly below its eye, because the ear is right there under the feathers.
Those feathers are called “auriculars” or “ear coverts” in bird anatomy. Lift them and you’d find the ear opening, the mouth of a short ear canal that runs inward to the eardrum.
What are bird ears called, then? From the outside, all you can see is the ear coverts.
Everything that does the hearing sits out of sight inside the head (the eardrum, the middle ear, and the inner ear), lined up in the same basic order as yours.
Why don’t birds have external ear flaps?
Their ancestors never had them. Ear flaps (pinnae, in anatomy terms) belong to mammals, and specifically to the marsupials and placental mammals, a group that includes dogs, deer, and you.
Birds come from a reptile line with no outer ears to pass down. That’s why ear flaps make such an easy tell when you’re sorting out how birds and mammals differ.
You’ll also read that ear flaps would ruin flight. As guesses go it’s a fair one, since anything sticking out of a bird’s head would catch the wind.
But it can’t explain losing them when there were never any flaps to lose.
Flightless birds are no exception. An Ostrich has no ear flaps either, and its ear openings sit right where a sparrow’s do, behind and below the eyes.
How well can birds hear?
Very well, right up until a sound gets too high.
Birds hear best from about 1,000 to 5,000 hertz. Hertz (Hz) counts vibrations per second, so a low number is a deep sound and a high number is a squeaky one.
Outside that band they still hear, only less keenly, and above about 5,000 Hz their sensitivity falls away fast.
Even the Barn Owl, a hunter that can catch a mouse by sound alone, tops out near 12,000 Hz, while a young person can hear up to about 20,000.
Ultrasound, the pitches above that? No bird has been shown to hear it.
The low end is a different story, at least for homing pigeons. They can detect infrasound (sound below about 20 Hz, too low for people to hear at all).
Do old birds go hard of hearing? Barn Owls, at least, don’t.
In one small study, owls more than 13 years old heard as well as owls under 2, and a single owl tested three times over 21 years, up to age 23, changed only slightly.
The researchers tie that to the way birds handle hair cells, the sensory cells in the inner ear that pick up sound. Loud noise kills them, and in people, once they’re gone, they’re gone.
The birds tested so far grow them back.
After noise damage, chickens replace lost hair cells and adult quail regrow them to within 5% of the original number, and hearing returns along with them, though not fully at the highest pitches.
Do owls have ears? How owls hear in the dark
Yes, and they’re hidden the same way, under feathers at the sides of the face.
Those pointy “ears” on a Great Horned Owl? Feather tufts. The real ear openings sit lower, tucked under the head feathers below them.
A Great Horned Owl hooting from a bare branch, white throat puffed out and feather tufts raised. Photo: Kelp Grizzly Photography/Shutterstock
Part of an owl’s edge is its face. The feathers around the eyes form a shallow bowl called a facial disc, and it works like a satellite dish, gathering sound and guiding it to the ear openings.
The other part is lopsided ears. Barn Owls and several other owl groups have one ear opening set higher on the skull than the other.
Not every owl has this. It evolved separately in at least five owl groups.
How does it help? In the Barn Owl, the best-studied example, timing and loudness split the job.
A sound off to one side reaches the nearer ear a hair sooner, and that tiny delay tells the owl left from right.
The lopsided ears handle up and down: a sound from above lands a little louder in one ear, and a sound from below lands louder in the other.
With both cues working, a Barn Owl can catch a mouse in the dark by hearing alone. It still uses its eyes whenever there’s light to see by.
A Barn Owl dropping talons-first toward dry grass. Photo: Ondrej Prosicky/Shutterstock
Stitch a Barn Owl of your own with the Barn Owl Cross Stitch Pattern: a perched owl among folk flowers, all full stitches, with a Pattern Keeper file included.
The Great Gray Owl, owner of the largest facial disc of any owl, hunts voles it can’t even see, under a foot of snow, by ear alone.
Snow complicates that. Low sounds get through it best, and it bends sound on the way, so a vole can seem to be somewhere it isn’t.
The owl’s fix is to hover directly over the sound, then plunge straight down, which cancels out that “acoustic mirage.”
For owl eyesight and the rest of how owls hunt, see these owl facts about how owls see and hunt.
A Great Gray Owl perched on a snow-covered snag in a winter forest. Photo: Kersti Lindstrom/Shutterstock
Can birds hear better than humans?
At one thing, yes. At another, no, and a third comes out about even. It all depends which part of hearing you mean.
Birds win on fine detail inside a single sound.
In lab tests, Budgerigars, canaries, and Zebra Finches heard pairs of sounds built from the same mix of tones, with only the shape of the sound wave changed.
They told the pairs apart even when that shape repeated every 1 to 2 thousandths of a second (milliseconds). People lose the difference below about 3 to 4 milliseconds.
Pitch is your win. Between 1,000 and 4,000 Hz, birds are about one-half to one-third as good as people at telling two close notes apart.
And short gaps? Close to a tie. Budgerigars and Zebra Finches notice a silent gap of about 2.5 milliseconds in a burst of static, which is about what people manage.
| Hearing skill | Birds | People |
|---|---|---|
| Highest pitch | Sensitivity drops steeply above about 5,000 Hz. Barn Owl reaches about 12,000 Hz. No bird shown to hear ultrasound | About 20,000 Hz when young, lower with age |
| Infrasound (below about 20 Hz) | Homing pigeons detect it | Too low to hear |
| Telling two close pitches apart | About one-half to one-third as good as people (1,000 to 4,000 Hz) | Better |
| Noticing a short silent gap | About 2.5 milliseconds | About the same |
| Fine timing inside one sound | Differences down to 1 to 2 milliseconds | Down to about 3 to 4 milliseconds |
| Middle-ear bones | One, the columella | Three |
| Regrowing hair cells after noise damage | Yes, in the species studied so far | No |
Most of these results come from lab tests on a handful of species: Budgerigars, canaries, Zebra Finches, Barn Owls, chickens, quail, and homing pigeons.
The broad outline of a song, which notes run high or low and how the rhythm goes, comes through to birds much as it does to you.
Some birds can also pick one familiar voice out of a crowd. A King Penguin chick finds its parents in a packed, noisy colony by the parent’s call, and one syllable of it is enough.
Emperor Penguins call with two voices at once, and the “beat” between them helps mates and chicks recognize each other.
An Emperor Penguin chick in gray down pressed against an adult on the ice. Photo: Myeongho Seo/Shutterstock
Do different bird species hear differently?
A Horned Lark standing among wildflowers in California’s Central Valley. Its little black “horns” are feather tufts, and its ears are hidden under the feathers behind its eyes. Photo: Jaymi Heimbuch
Less than you might expect, at least in the basics. The birds tested so far mostly hear best in the same band, roughly 1,000 to 5,000 Hz, and where they part ways is in what each one listens for.
About one in ten bird species feeds underwater. Can they hear down there?
In one study, a trained Great Cormorant could. Submerged, it heard best at around 2,000 Hz, and between 1,000 and 4,000 Hz its underwater hearing was about as sensitive as a seal’s or a toothed whale’s.
American Robins listen to the lawn.
In a small aviary experiment, four robins hunted mealworms buried out of sight, with nothing to see, smell, or feel through the ground, and still found them, though fewer once white noise drowned out the sound.
On a real lawn they probably use eyes and ears together. If robins work your yard, the guide to what American Robins eat covers the rest of their menu.
An American Robin standing in tall grass with an earthworm in its bill. Photo: RLS Photo/Shutterstock
Learning the robin’s song? The American Robin Song Sticker pairs a robin with the memory phrase for its call, “cheer-up, cheerily.”
A few birds may even hear bad weather on the way.
Golden-winged Warblers wearing tiny trackers (geolocators) left their breeding territories more than 24 hours before a tornado-producing storm arrived, then flew a five-day detour of about 930 miles (1,500 km).
The researchers’ likeliest explanation? They heard the storm as infrasound.
Homing pigeons detect infrasound too. Whether they use it to find their way home is still a hypothesis, proposed by one researcher.
Night migrants, meanwhile, call to each other in flight, and those calls are thought to help keep a flock in contact.
Then there’s the Oilbird, which finds its way in total darkness by echolocation. It clicks, then listens for the echoes.
How do birds hear without external ears?
The whole head does the job.
As a sound reaches a bird, the shape of its head alters it slightly differently depending on whether it came from above or below, and that difference gives the bird a cue for height, a cue researchers have measured in crows, ducks, and chickens.
None of them has ear flaps or a ruff of feathers to help.
Inside, the path is short. Sound runs down the ear canal to the eardrum, and from there a single bone, the columella, carries the vibration inward.
One bone. You have three in that spot: the hammer, the anvil, and the stirrup.
At the end sits the basilar papilla, the bird version of the cochlea. Yours is coiled like a snail shell.
A bird’s is short and uncoiled, about 10 millimeters (0.4 inch) long at most, with owls carrying the longest ones, and it’s lined with the same hair cells that regrew in the noise studies.
What does a short, simple ear do with a song? Plenty.
The birds tested in labs follow the shape of the sound wave inside each note in finer detail than people can, with Zebra Finches especially sensitive to it.
Picture a Pacific Wren pouring out dozens of notes a second. (In eastern North America the bird is the Winter Wren, counted as the same species until 2010.)
You might guess the speed is what loses a human listener.
It may not be, since birds and people catch short gaps about equally well, and going by the lab results, the bigger difference is the detail packed inside each note.
Will you ever hear a wren the way another wren does? Probably not.
You can still learn to pick one out by its song, though, and the guide to learning bird songs by ear is a good place to start.
How does noise affect birds, and what can you do?
Noise can drown out the sounds birds depend on. Some birds adjust their songs or their schedules to get around it. Others just leave.
In the noisier parts of Leiden, in the Netherlands, Great Tits sing at a higher pitch.
European Robins in a British study (a different bird from the American Robin) sang at night where daytime noise ran loud, and daytime noise predicted that night singing better than artificial light did.
Researchers in Idaho played recorded traffic noise through a roadless area where migrating birds stop to rest and feed, and bird numbers there fell by more than a quarter, with some species almost completely avoiding the noise.
The birds that stayed were in poorer condition.
What can you do in your own yard? The easiest fixes cost nothing. Put feeders away from roads and away from loud equipment like air conditioners, and keep your own racket down near the places birds feed.
Plantings help less than you’d hope. A noise buffer has to be wide (about 100 feet) and dense, ideally evergreen, and it works best close to the source of the noise.
Even then, a drop of more than 3 to 5 decibels is unlikely (measured in dBA, the decibel scale weighted toward how loud a sound seems to people).
Curious how birds do with their other senses? Start with whether birds can smell.
If owls are your favorite part of all this, the owl collection in the Better With Birds shop has Barn Owl and Great Horned Owl cross-stitch patterns, posters and stickers built around owl calls, and a Snowy Owl ornament.
Bird ears and hearing FAQ
Do penguins have ears?
Yes. Like every bird, a penguin has an ear opening on each side of its head and no ear flap.
King Penguins add some diving gear. Tissue in the middle ear can swell to balance the water pressure on a deep dive, and similar tissue and muscles around the ear canal may squeeze it shut, sealing off the eardrum.
Are any birds deaf?
Birds can lose hearing to loud noise, just as people can. Unlike people, birds in the species studied so far grow the lost hair cells back, and most of their hearing returns.
Hearing trouble can also be inherited, in at least one domestic breed. The Belgian Waterslager canary carries an inner-ear problem that leaves it poor at telling pitches apart.
