Many animals have a vastly superior sense of smell, can see light outside our visible spectrum or hear sound outside our hearing range. But it would be silly to call all these things “telepathy” just because we humans don’t have these senses.

It would be silly to call these things telepathy because by themselves they don’t facilitate a way to communicate thoughts between two minds. Even in the case of radio waves, a sense of radio waves wouldn’t be telepathy by itself, unless there is also a mechanism of generating these radio waves, and unless these two mechanisms are used to communicate ideas between users, just like the sense of hearing is just one part of spoken communication.

If a species had an organ that could generate light outside the visible spectrum to accompany their superior eyes, and they were using it to talk, then yes “telepathic” would a sensible word to describe that. But that special organ, and the mental processing, would be the important parts, not the better eyes.

And when you’re talking about the biology of animals it seems quite self-centred to compare everything to us. We are just one very specific animal.

Well, I didn’t write the definitions. :)

Hah, I’d expect “ordinary” and “normal” here to mean “ordinary / normal senses for a human”, not for the hypothetical telepathy user. That wouldn’t be a very useful usage of these words, so I doubt that’s what was meant here. There is always a reference point for someone saying something is “normal” or “ordinary”, and that reference point, for a human dictionary, would be a human with human senses.

When I say that a shark has an extraordinary set of teeth, I obviously mean from a human point of view, and not claiming that it’s not normal from the shark’s point of view. And when I, or a dictionary, say that telepathy doesn’t use usual senses, similarly the meaning is that they would be unusual for a human, and personally I would find a species having a sense for radio waves, to be unusual.

And if they could use it to exchange thoughts and ideas with others, I’d call that telepathy, but they don’t/

Britannica dictionary defines it with “without using the usual sensory channels”

Cambridge dictionary with “without using words or other physical signals”

Collins “without speech, writing, or any other normal signals”

Merriam-Webster uses “extrasensory”, and they define “extrasensory” as “outside the ordinary senses”

All of it seems to match radio communication, and all require it to be between two persons or minds, so flowers and bees definitely don’t qualify.

Why inconsistent? It’s a transfer of information without physical interaction and without using any human senses.

I guess the difference in definition would be “human” senses. If you define it as using no human senses it fits, if you define it as not using any senses it doesn’t, but that would be a useless definition, because nothing could possibly satisfy it.

If a species used radio communication, I don’t think I’d be against people calling it telepathy.