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How young animals learn to migrate
While advances in biologging have revealed many spectacular animal migrations, it remains poorly understood how young animals learn to migrate. Even in social species, it is unclear how migratory skills are transmitted from one generation to another and what implications this may have. Here we show that in Caspian terns Hydroprogne caspia family groups, genetic and foster…
Bird Migration
I believe that it is possible that dowsers may have unique insights into how birds navigate over long distances. There seem to be three principle discussions on how navigation is done: firstly using magnetic orientation especially in homing pigeons, secondly on the use of olfactory clues, thirdly on the anomaly that Robins (Passerines) have their…
Nature’s Radar – Tristan Gooley
Nature’s Radar a paper by Tristan Gooley (one of our heroes) published in the Journal of Navigation in October 2012. Tristan and a friend set out in a little boat to navigate from Kirkwall on the North of Ockney via the Faroes over the top of Iceland to Reykjavik. Please see http://www.naturalnavigator.com/nature’s_radar.pdf for the full paper. The…
A conceptual framework on the role of magnetic cues in songbird migration ecology
This paper is difficult to understand but it summarises the work on animal navigation to date. The key is that all the research which is confident that animals navigate using magnetic cues are not necessarily the whole story and that all navigators use all the clues they can get to help them. Recently there was…
Pigeon navigation RIN 11
A summary: The RIN Conference spends a lot of time on pigeon navigation, with delegates coming from all over the world. The leading players in this world are the Wilschkos from the Johann Wilfgang University Germany, M. Walker from the University of Auckland, and A. Gagliardo of the University of Pisa. Overall, it was decided…
Bar-tailed Godwit’s sense of direction
The bar tailed Godwit is about 37/39cms (15ins) long which summers in the arctic yet migrates to warmer locations during the winter. These include astonishing non-stop flights over the Pacific to New Zealand every Northern winter. As you can see from the tracks, you will see it flies in a perfect straight flight from the Arctic…