Bogong Moths
This paper is about the extraordinary Bogong moths of Australia who navigate to caves in the mountains during the summer to avoid high temperatures
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In Praise Of Walking by Shane O’Mara
The new science of how we walk and why it’s good for us This is a snippet from the book, In Praise of Walking by Shane O’Mara, which examines the science behind one of the basic skills that defines us as human beings. Scientists are slowly working out how our sense of direction works. It’s…
Conversations about animal navigation…
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…
The Wayfinders of the South Seas
I was looking through an old copy of Classic Boat magazine (September 2004) when I discovered this article on how traditional Polynesian navigators operated. I have précised this article. For me, the importance of all this is that humans are animals but we can communicate together so that insights on how we navigated before the…
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…
How do dogs know the right direction and yet when they do know the route home, why do they not take it but sit and wait to be found?
Examples with my Welsh terrier Rhubarbe. Living in Paris, he and I used to walk in the Champs de Mars by the Eiffel Tower at least twice a week and sometimes more. He knew the way there and back by heart. He walked without a lead and once in the park, which is not closed,…
Do you have a sense of direction?
There is a lot of work going on in the navigation field. All the researchers in this field are now clear that navigation takes place in the sub-conscious. I made the mistake of thinking that native peoples who seemed to navigate perfectly without any aids could tell me how they did it, but language is…