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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
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.
Maybe flying along a motorway takes less energy because of the rising air.