The Orientation of Pigeons at Gravity Anomalies

Abstract

The means by which homing pigeons determine the direction to their home loft when released in unfamiliar territory remains a mystery. Hypotheses involving the sun (Matthews, 1953, 1955), Coriolis force and the earth’s magnetic field (Yeagley, 1947, 1951), inertial cues (Barlow, 1964, 1966), infrasound (Kreithen & Quine, 1979), have been advanced but currently there is no strong empirical support for any of these hypotheses. Recently Papi (see Papi, 1976; Papi et al. 1980 for reviews) and Wallraff (1980) have proposed that olfactory cues are the basis of the pigeons’ position-finding ability but not all investigators are convinced by the evidence (see e.g. Able, 1980; Keeton, 1980; Schmidt-Koenig, 1979; Walcott & Lednor, 1983).