๐”– Bobbio Scriptorium
โœฆ   LIBER   โœฆ

Magnetic Position Determination by Homing Pigeons?

โœ Scribed by W. IAN REILLY

Book ID
102613869
Publisher
Elsevier Science
Year
2002
Tongue
English
Weight
144 KB
Volume
218
Category
Article
ISSN
0022-5193

No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.

โœฆ Synopsis

How pigeons return home from unfamiliar release sites is a long-standing puzzle in animal behaviour. Walker (1998, 1999) has described a "vector summation model" which "identifies a novel coordinate that pigeons could use with magnetic total intensity to determine position". The model is not applicable in a magnetic field generated simply by a geocentric dipole, but requires a field perturbed by higher-order sources. Tests are devised to simulate the addition of both regional and local magnetic anomalies to a geocentric dipole field, and to calculate the directions of the home loft from a number of release sites. The results indicate that a pigeon would be unlikely to derive useful information from the model.

๐Ÿ“œ SIMILAR VOLUMES

Navigation: Homing by Pigeons
Navigation: Homing by Pigeons
๐Ÿ“‚ Article ๐Ÿ“… 1973 ๐Ÿ› Nature Publishing Group ๐ŸŒ English โš– 273 KB
Orientation of homing pigeons at magneti
Orientation of homing pigeons at magnetic anomalies
โœ A. J. Lednor; C. Walcott ๐Ÿ“‚ Article ๐Ÿ“… 1988 ๐Ÿ› Springer ๐ŸŒ English โš– 561 KB

Young homing pigeons released at a site on the edge of a magnetic anomaly and then in the center of the anomaly show better orientation at the anomalous site than birds released there for the first time. To test the possibility that this improvement is the result of birds learning to obtain navigati