With the emergence of GPS, the need to think has diminished our innate navigational skills.
Rosamund F Langston, PhD Lecturer in Behavioural Neuroscience at Ninewells Hospital describes this loss of our innate navigational skills, because like all skills, if you do not use them, you lose them.
She includes map reading as one of the soon to be forgotten skills, but also a sense of direction too.
I hold the view that animals, the ancient peoples and the aborigines navigate perfectly well without compasses. This we often call a sense of direction. People with a sense of direction very seldom get lost even on dark nights even in unfamiliar territory. Not everyone has a sense of direction but those who do rely…
I love this little observation by James Mather… “I was on a ladder clearing the gutters end of last week, and over a period of hours heard a number of flocks of birds gathering to migrate, and I could see them heading off in V-formation. Then, at one point, low cloud closed in, but I…
Intro This piece has been forwarded to me by one of our editors: Simon Raggett. He gives us the quantum twist. You will also find much written here on the subject of avian navigation based around gravity from our editor Antonio Nafarrate, who has been in communication with the authors of this piece. Please follow…
How do pigeons navigate? Racing homing pigeons navigate incredible distances with apparent ease. A champion racing pigeon can be released 400 miles from its home loft, in a place it has never been before, and return within 1 day. The last 40 miles of its journey, the bird navigates by sight. But over the other 360…
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…
In this paper you find a rather fascinating overview of the migration of Birds. Malik, Y. S., Arun Prince Milton, A., Ghatak, S. & Ghosh, S. 2021 Adaptation and Evolution of Bird Migration. In Role of Birds in Transmitting Zoonotic Pathogens, pp. 3-14. Singapore Springer Singapore. Malik 2021