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How Homing Pigeons Navigate
goombah99 writes "Over the years there has been much research and speculation on how homing pigeons navigate. The assumption has been they need some novel sensory mechanism to give them north-south orientation information. Theories included magnetic field sensitivty and polarized light sensitivity, other possibilies include analysing the motion of the sun. But British researchers appear to have cracked the case: they follow roads and landmarks and don't require special senses. Birds, it seems, actually follow the longer as-the-dog-walks path of the road, even circling over round-abouts rather than the straight 'as-the-bird-flies' path one would expect if they used absolute position sensing."
I work in a lab examining Avian Visual Psychology -
there's a great online text edited by the Professor I work for completely free with sample videos and works by many of the great researchers in this field:
http://www.pigeon.psy.tufts.edu
I believe this may be a way for the pigeons to adapt their inate skills to the modern world. I believe in pre-civilization times the birds would have followed rivers and waterways like they are following the roads today.
It would be interesting to do a study in an area without roads and population to see if this is indeed the case.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
where Bernie is the affectionate name given to pigeon 37.
... not to mention that we could maybe train them to poop on slow drivers. :)
Think about it. A local news agency opens up a dozen or so little offices distributed around your city. It then trains pigeons to go to and from a couple of the offices, and attaches a small video camera with a decent transmitter to Bernie's leg. Since the pigeons follow roads, you'll have a live feed (no pun intended) of the road every pigeon is flying over.
Better yet, it seems likely that a greater number of pigeons will follow major roads, and fewer follow minor roads. That's more coverage of the main arteries, exactly what we need. And if you attach a GPS unit, you can localize which PigeonFeed (TM) you want to look at.
Sure beats millions of dollars for helicopters and thousands more for fuel
*blinking cursor*
Why, no, not at all. If you look closely at /. stories in the past few months, you'll find others from Al Jazeera. Also, if you go to new.google.com, you'll find them well represented in the top stories. In particular, they've had good summaries of a lot of technical and scientific stories.
;-)
You'd think that the Al Jazeera folks are trying to be a respected news source or something.
(I was trying hard not to say "fair and balanced.
Their Middle-East reporting makes for interesting reading, too. They often give you a somewhat different slant than Western news services.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
However, this brings up a question: Prior to industrialization, how did they navigate? What about prior to human habitation of areas? Or did they only begin to become homing pigeons when they had definite paths to follow?
Of course, this totally screws up the Airspeed-Velocity of an Unladen Swallow because velocity is a vector, and vectors require a direction....And we thought we had that figured out! Damn!
--<Mike>--
Maybe flying along a motorway takes less energy because of the rising air.