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."

Comments

Re:Obligatory...

[fredrikj]

Or now we know why Google's search results are so good.

Makes sense

[crow]

Birds obviously have great memories. Parrots and certain other species can memorize sounds perfectly (and play them back). It's no wonder that they can memorize landmarks with similar perfection.

Now this doesn't eliminate the idea that they can sense magnetic lines, giving them an ability to memorize things that we don't see, especially for flights over water.

RFC 1149

[Garridan]

So THAT explains why my connection always gets so laggy when there's construction on the roads!

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1149.html

aljazeera? better article in Sunday Times IMHO

[real_smiff]

Pigeons shun the sun to take the high road home

By Mark Henderson

Famous for their uncanny ability to navigate by the Sun, homing pigeons may in fact be taking a lazier option: following the motorways and A-roads conveniently mapped out by human beings. Using satellite tracking devices, scientists found that the birds, like motorists, prefer major roads to more direct routes home. on Saturdays you can see flocks over the M5 . . .

THE secret of the carrier pigeon's uncanny ability to find its home coop has been revealed by British scientists: they do it by following roads.

When the birds are released miles from home they navigate back in remarkably similar fashion to their human owners, choosing the trunk routes recommended in road atlases, a major satellite tracking study has shown.

Homing pigeons will often cruise down a motorway before turning on to city ring roads and exiting at major junctions, even when such a path adds miles to the journey.

Hardly ever do pigeons travel as "the crow flies", preferring instead to take the lazy mental option, even when it involves much greater physical exertion. Just like drivers, they select straight main roads rather than twisting country lanes, choosing economy of thought over fuel efficiency.

The findings, from a team at Oxford University, indicate that homing pigeons do not always navigate by taking bearings on the Sun, as has often been assumed, but rather seek out short cuts that make journeys less taxing.

"It really has knocked our research team sideways to find that pigeons appear to ignore their inbuilt directional instinct and follow the road system," said Tim Guilford, Professor of Zoology, who led the study. "The routes they take are not the most efficient in terms of physical effort, but they are very efficient in terms of mental effort. They settle on a route that's fairly energy-efficient, but it's never the most efficient. Following the road network seems to make the journey that much more relaxing."

In the study, Professor Guilford and his colleague Dora Biro attached miniature global positioning satellite tracking devices, each weighing just 18 grams, to homing pigeons. These were then released up to 20 miles away from their home coops in Oxfordshire.

While the birds initially used the Sun to get their bearings, they rapidly learnt the layout of the road network and used it as a guide to getting home.

Different pigeons developed different favourite routes, but all of them tended to follow linear features on the landscape wherever possible -- roads, railway lines, hedgerows and rivers.

"By matching their routes to detailed maps it is striking to see the pigeons fly straight down the A34 Oxford bypass, and then sharply curve off at the traffic lights before curving off again at the roundabout," Professor Guilford said.

"It was almost comical watching one group of birds that we released near a major A-road. They followed the road to the first junction, where they all turned right and, a couple of junctions on, they all turned left.

"They must be tracking linear features because it's an easy way to keep going in the correct direction. It is like the driver on the motorway, who can relax a bit on the long, straight stretches, then thinks hard at the difficult junction."

The study, which is being prepared for publication, will be featured in the BBC One series Animal Camera, which starts next Thursday.

Homing pigeons normally navigate by an innate solar compass, which allows them to check their bearings by watching the Sun. They also rely on landmarks for familiar routes, however, and the new findings suggest that this is their preferred method.

"This research is exciting because the traditional view of bird navigation is that they use a Sun-based compass at all times," Professor Guilford said. "But we have found that if we drive a pigeon in a van and then release it, the bird will still use

Thats not what the article says.

[Captain Rotundo]

The (very short) article says that the birds will home in the firsttime a flight is done using thier own "navigational system". It does say after many flights they settle in on a routine path, that tends to follow roads. As if (big surprise!) its easier to follow the landmarks that to use that "navigational system".

Once again the slashdot blurb completely misrepresents the article. Good work guys :)

Re:Thats not what the article says.

[SpaceLifeForm]

Not to mention that since pigeons are smart, and they know they were wired for the study, why would they give away their navigation secrets for free? Much easier to fool the humans by appearing to follow landmarks such as roads since the pigeons know that humans can relate to that!

Anyone seriously interested...

[Ieshan]

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

RFC 1149

[El]

So, in essence what they are saying is that we can minimize RTT (Round Trip Time) delays when using RFC 1149 "A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers" by painting huge lines on the ground directly between source and destination? I'm sure network implementers will cooing with joy at this revelation!

Since I'm NOT RTFA about pigeons....

[narftrek]

I must rant in traditional /. fashion. Here goes:

I AM APALLED by the fact that one would even suggest such as stupid theory. Listen up guys: Enough of this silly "they follow the roads stuff" Some of us are actually trying to make money off this "imaginary" magnetic-ion-built-in-GPS navigation system that pigeons DO in fact have. If you keep putting out simple explanations to things like this, you're gonna run the rest of us lunatic scientists out of business. We NEED those government grants!
</rant>

Now back to finishing my 5 assed pigeon....

Rivers..

[molo]

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

Re:Rivers..

[stoolpigeon]

I was thinking the same thing. Of course the trick to testing it out would be to find and area without roads and population.

Not a lot of those left in general- let alone where pigeons live.

I-95 South Congested (reported by Bernie)

[merdaccia]

where Bernie is the affectionate name given to pigeon 37.

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 ... not to mention that we could maybe train them to poop on slow drivers. :)

Re:Aljazeera?

[jc42]

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.

Ya know....

[trainsnpep]

They're pretty smart for a dumb bird....Who'd a thunk?

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!

BBC

[$exyNerdie]

I read this article on BBC a last week. If you would like to, you can read it here.

CNN also carried a story on this.

Some more news sites that carried this news are
How do homing pigeons navigate ?

Pigeons navigate 'by following roads'

Pigeons take the highway

The homing pigeon's ploy: follow that road

Pigeons home in on the roads

I was a little surprised that out of all the news sites, someone picked it up on Al jazeera... Not that I have anything against any news channel....

Thermals?

[thogard]

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