Two heads better than one? Homing pigeons flap faster to fly together

AUGUST 7, 2019

Wildlife researchers have long tried to understand why birds fly in flocks, ranging from structured V-formations to loose clusters that involve complex aerodynamic interactions between group members. Frequently cited benefits of collective travel include improved flight efficiency, enhanced navigation and greater safety from predators.

Partially supported by the EU-funded HawkEye project, a team of researchers have found that homing pigeons expend more energy flying in pairs rather than solo. Their findings were published in the journal PLOS Biology. "As expected, paired individuals benefited from improved homing route accuracy, which reduced flight distance by 7 percent and time by 9 percent."

In a press release by the University of Oxford's Department of Zoology, the study's lead author Dr. Lucy Taylor says: "The results of this study were completely unexpected. Energy is the currency of life so it's astonishing that the birds are prepared to pay a substantial energetic cost to fly together."

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Homing pigeons use local natural odors to find their way

Reproducibility study disproves a popular hypothesis about how pigeons successfully return home

Date:  July 26, 2018

Source:  Springer

Homing pigeons use familiar smells to navigate their way across hundreds of kilometers of unfamiliar territory. Researchers have now confirmed that artificial odors cannot be used to stimulate or trigger a pigeon's navigation system. This means that the so-called olfactory activation hypothesis -- which has been proposed by some researchers -- should be disregarded, argues Anna Gagliardo of the University of Pisa in Italy. Gagliardo and her colleagues have published their research in Springer's Journal of Comparative Physiology A.

The researchers set out to test the olfactory activation hypothesis proposed by a team of Portuguese and American scientists in 2009 and 2010, by using similar steps and methods. In order to replicate the study, Gagliardo and her colleagues used 63 adult inexperienced pigeons that were allowed to perform spontaneous flights in their home area. The birds were divided into three experimental groups then each fitted with a GPS-tracking device, and released singly 53 kilometers from home.

The first group was transported in open crates and released without manipulation. Pigeons in group two were carried and kept at the release site in airtight containers ventilated with natural air before they were released. The third group also travelled in an airtight container, with the air filtered to remove most of the natural odorants it might contain. During their travels and before their release, the birds in this group were exposed to the scents of lavender, eucalyptus, rose and thyme. Prior to their release, the nasal cavities of the birds in the second and third groups were washed with a zinc sulphate solution in order to make them temporarily unable to smell.

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Homing pigeons share our human ability to build knowledge across generations

Date: April 18, 2017 Source: University of Oxford


Homing pigeons may share the human capacity to build on the knowledge of others, improving their navigational efficiency over time, a new Oxford University study has found.

The ability to gather, pass on and improve on knowledge over generations is known as cumulative culture. Until now humans and, arguably some other primates, were the only species thought to be capable of it.

Takao Sasaki and Dora Biro, Research Associates in the Department of Zoology at Oxford University, conducted a study testing whether homing pigeons can gradually improve their flight paths, over time. They removed and replaced individuals in pairs of birds that were given a specific navigational task. Ten chains of birds were released from the same site and generational succession was simulated with the continuous replacement of birds familiar with the route with inexperienced birds who had never flown the course before. The idea was that these individuals could then pass their experience of the route down to the next pair generation, and also enable the collective intelligence of the group to continuously improve the route's efficiency.

 

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Explainer: How Do Homing Pigeons Navigate?

By Tim Guilford, University of Oxford | April 26, 2014 02:10am ET

This article was originally published at The Conversation.The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Pigeons have extraordinary navigational abilities. Take a pigeon from its loft and let it go somewhere it has never been before and it will, after circling in the sky for while, head home. This remarkable capacity extends to places tens even hundreds of kilometres from its home and is all the more remarkable to humans because we are apparently incapable of it ourselves.

But we have long made use of the pigeon’s homing ability, principally for carrying messages in the past. And for several decades now the pigeon has played centre stage in scientists’ attempts to understand the map and compass mechanisms fundamental to bird navigation.

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How Pigeons May Smell Their Way Home

Nov. 5, 2013 — Homing pigeons, like other birds, are extraordinary navigators, but how they manage to find their way back to their lofts is still debated. To navigate, birds require a 'map' (to tell them home is south, for example) and a 'compass' (to tell them where south is), with the sun and the earth's magnetic field being the preferred compass systems. A new paper provides evidence that the information pigeons use as a map is in fact available in the atmosphere: odors and winds allow them to find their way home.

The results are now published in Biogeosciences, an open access journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU).

Experiments over the past 40 years have shown that homing pigeons get disoriented when their sense of smell is impaired or when they don't have access to natural winds at their home site. But many researchers were not convinced that wind-borne odors could provide the map pigeons need to navigate. Now, Hans Wallraff of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen, Germany, has shown that the atmosphere does contain the necessary information to help pigeons find their way home.

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Pigeons Fly Home With a Map in Their Heads

July 25, 2013 — It is a fascinating phenomenon that homing pigeons always find their way home. A doctoral student in biology at the University of Zurich has now carried out experiments proving that pigeons have a spatial map and thus possess cognitive capabilities. In unknown territories, they recognize where they are in relation to their loft and are able to choose their targets themselves.

Homing pigeons fly off from an unknown place in unfamiliar territory and still manage to find their way home. Their ability to find their way home has always been fascinating to us humans. Despite intensive research, it is not yet definitively clear where this unusual gift comes from. All we know is that homing pigeons and migratory birds determine their flight direction with the help of Earth's magnetic field, the stars and the position of the sun. As Nicole Blaser, a doctoral student in biology at the University of Zurich demonstrates in the Journal of Experimental Biology, homing pigeons navigate using a mental map.

Navigating like a robot or cognitive capabilities?

Research proposes two approaches to explain how homing pigeons can find their home loft when released from an unfamiliar place. The first version assumes that pigeons compare the coordinates of their current location with those of the home loft and then systematically reduce the difference between the two until they have brought the two points together. If this version is accurate, it would mean that pigeons navigate like flying robots. The second version accords the pigeons a spatial understanding and "knowledge" of their position in space relative to their home loft. This would presuppose a type of mental map in their brain and thus cognitive capabilities. Up until now, there has not been any clear evidence to support the two navigation variants proposed.

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Homing pigeon 'Bermuda Triangle' explained

By Rebecca Morelle

Science reporter, BBC World Service

The mystery of the "Bermuda Triangle" of the homing pigeon world may have been solved.

For years, scientists have been baffled as to why the usually excellent navigators get lost when released from a particular site in New York State.

But new research suggests the birds are using low frequency sounds to find their way around - and they cannot hear the rumble at this US location.

The study is published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

The lead author of the paper, Dr Jonathan Hagstrum, from the US Geological Survey, said that the birds were creating "acoustic maps" of their surroundings.

But some other researchers said the theory was controversial and there was much debate over how homing pigeons navigate so efficiently.

Continued:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21262170

‘Stop the pigeon’: Egypt police sends bird to criminal investigation department

In an incident that brings back old mailing tools, a pigeon was found Sunday in Egypt’s northeastern city of Qalyubia with a written message tied to one of its feet and a microfilm attached to the other, a local newspaper reported. 

The Qalyubia Security Directorate said that a security guard called Saber Ibrahim filed a report (numbered 302) after he found “an injured homing pigeon carrying a message that reads "Islam Egypt" and a microfilm,” reported Ahram Online.

“The pigeon has been sent to the Criminal Investigation Department while the microfilm has been sent to the Egyptian Radio and Television Union (ERTU) to be developed,” reported the website.

The pigeon was seized and taken by police, along with the letter and the film, to a criminal laboratory for investigation. No further details were announced until now.

However, the incident prompted some sarcastic responses among Egyptian Twitter users, who associated the letter to President Mohamed Mursi, who has always referred to his Freedom and Justice Party’s Renaissance Project as a bird that would fly Egypt’s obstacles.

Egyptian activist Samira Ibrahim tweeted saying: “Breaking: The Renaissance pigeon is now under custody and is now held a Shubra police department.”

http://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2013/01/14/260348.html

Tough question of survival as our garden songbirds are increasingly falling as prey

ABOUT three years ago you kindly printed a letter I wrote about the loss of our garden birds due to magpies stealing eggs and chicks and a sparrow hawk killing all our sparrows.

You then printed a response from the local homing pigeon club, who were suffering bird losses which they were sure were down to hawk attacks.

I did also write to the RSPB with my concerns but they wrote back dismissing my thoughts and blaming changes in farming practices and loss of habitat. They had obviously not checked my post code, because we all know early cut silage, cereal crops, pest spraying and ripping out hedges do not happen here in the Pennines. My wife and I cancelled our membership.

What has prompted me to write in again was a feature on the BBC’s One Show on October 16. It glorified the killing success of a pair of peregrine falcons who lived on a cathedral. They examined the remains of the birds they had killed and these included estuary and woodland birds - odd as this city was far inland. They deduced that the night lights of the city allowed these hawks to kill birds at night whilst they migrate. This the One Show applauded - it came across as a success for our bird life!

Continued:  http://www.hebdenbridgetimes.co.uk/community/letters/tough-question-of-survival-as-our-garden-songbirds-are-increasingly-falling-as-prey-1-5086134