Our Editor Antonio Nafarrate has sent us this:
Hello all and happy 2015. Please check enclosed forwarded video that is definite proof that birds have in their brains a Schuler tuned gyroscopically stabilized inertial platform.
Best wishes from Antonio Nafarrate.
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;…
We know that cuckoos nest over winter in the Congo and breed in Europe. UK cuckoos arrive in the latter part of April and lay their eggs in another bird’s nest. The common host of cuckoos are Reed warblers, Meadow pipits and even non-migratory Robins. The juveniles a month later in May. The fledgling casts out the other…
This is an English term for sheep that learn to live in a particular location who do not stray from their “land”. For us this is another piece of the jigsaw of how animals operate in the wild and know where “home” is. DEFRA ( Britain’s government Agency for Rural Affairs) asked ADAS to do…
Useful links wikipedia.org/wiki/Swallow birdsofbritain.co.uk/bird-guide/swallow.asp Below is the of the swallow migration map: www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/autumnwatch/2009/11/lates… We, in Europe, measure the beginning of Spring by the arrival of the swallows. Many swallows make a 6,000 mile journey from Europe to winter in South Africa and back. I believe, that the way that swallows make this migration is by…
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….
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