Editor’s comments: This paper is quite old but it does propose another navigation mechanism than the current obsession with magnetic orientation. The magnetic field has the terrible drawback of changing all the time and birds have migrating successfully before and after the Earth’s magnetic field flipped South for North. Albatrosses fitted with head magnets (to…
Susanne Åkesson is one of the foremost academics working in the field of animal navigation. Her recent paper: “Timing avian long-distance migration: from internal clock mechanisms to global flights” is impressive and important. Please see attached the whole paper: Timing avian long-distance migration: from internal clock mechanisms to global flights. One of the critical questions is…
Humans, who are after all sophisticated animals have a very highly developed frontal cortex. This does our intellectual thinking. The right side is usually dominant. It also tends to be where humans view their world. Almost no humans feel and respond to the sub conscious. We have the concept of conscious frontal cortex operation and…
Dr Kate Jeffery is one of our heroes and has a lab at University College London where she experiments with what the brain is doing when rats navigate around a maze. In her experimental rig, she can see neurons fire up as the rat faces in different directions (head direction cells) while it is exploring….
You will find other descriptions here of Henri Weimerskirch’s work on Albatrosses under Albatrosses on this site as well as Anna Gagliardo’s work on the use of smell in navigation. A book recently written by Adam Nicholson called “The Seabirds Cry” is fascinating about the mythology and lives of the sea birds in his book;…
At a recent meeting of the Royal Institute of Navigation I met Jon Ward. Jon was brought up in Africa as a boy and spent much time roaming the countryside and going to distant villages out of sight of his home. We talked about Animal navigation and I told him that I thought that as…
This site takes you into the world where technology is trying to understand animal migration by using tags and a sophisticated satellite system to follow routes taken by animals. Up until now tags have often been very heavy, or at least too heavy for a lot of tiny birds that make huge migrations such as…