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Magnetism

There is a lot of work showing that animals can detect magnetic fields but it is important to remember – no moving electric charge, no magnetism. We have spoken of the pineal gland which detects ALL  frequencies because of its shape. It is the fundamental shape emerging from two intersecting vortices – in other words…

Dowsing Dolphins by Jim Lyons

Background From time to time, I scan the literature to find out the latest ideas on animal behaviour but navigation in particular. Despite numerous papers involving the tracking of birds, hamsters, fish etc., I struggle to find the word that readers of this Journal use all the time – Dowsing. Since the first recording of…

Ingo Schiffner at RIN11

At RIN11 Ingo Schiffner gave his presentation Mathematical Analysis of Pigeon Tracks (the characterisation of the underlying navigational process). He analysed 167 tracks with birds navigating from four different locations and from two different directions. His theory is that pigeons navigate using at least four different components and these components change over the course of…

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…

The need for help

It is interesting, that the need to know how to get somewhere is often the trigger that enables navigation to begin. I discussed this with a friend of mine, whose wife always says, “Why do you use a SatNav when your own direction finding is better every time?” We discussed how his sense of direction…