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Hippocampus by Simon Raggett
I was at a lecture on animal navigation at the Royal Society this week. Nothing world changing, but possibly some useful bits of background regarding navigation. This deals with the mammal brain, but given the similarities in behaviour between mammals and birds one can assume the birds might achieve some similar process. The important brain…
Songbirds really do fly south for the winter
There has been a recent article in the New Scientist 9 August 2014 entitled: “Songbirds really do fly south for the winter” Scientists had postulated that intercontinental migratory songbirds flew north for the summer to breed in order to escape overcrowding and intense competition in the tropics. Most of us had always though that the…
Ways pigeons might home
Here is a fascinating YouTube video discussing different ways a pigeon might home. The people shown here are our heroes, who are really important people in the animal navigation world and especially in Pigeon navigation. You will find Tim Guildford at Oxford University, who believes that pigeons follow landmarks, The Wiltchokos who believe in magnetic…
Our co-editor Antonio Nafarrate has recently written these remarks
Following the 2016 Royal Institute of Navigation (RIN) Conference on “Animal Navigation”, Dr. Painter claims that after some 50 years of work, the Magnetic “mechanism is not fully understood”. In my judgment, it will never be, because there is no such mechanism. The Geomagnetic Field (GMF) is only a minor perturbation to the true navigational…
Avian Compass Reloaded
http://www.2physics.com/2012/10/avian-compass-reloaded.html Please find this interesting piece entitled The Avian Compass Reloaded by Dagomir Kaszlikowski at the Centre for Quantum Technologies, Department of Physics, National University of Singapore. Kaszlikowski talks about the the quantum effect that is required to enable the Cryptochromes in the eye of the European Robin to be sensitive to the earth’s magnetic field….
Albatross Navigation
The Albatross that ranges over huge areas of the South Atlantic Region in overcast weather where sun clues are seldom available to return to their breeding islands such as Crozet in the South Atlantic, work done by Bonadonna et al in 2004 shows that manipulating the albatrosses by altering their magnetic environment made no difference…

