How do birds discern direction? How birds find their way

1. Celestial navigation.

Someone put starlings during the migratory season.

Placed in a round birdcage, it is found that when there is sunlight, starlings will constantly flap their wings in one direction, anxious to fly out. The direction in which they fly out is the same as that of starlings in the wild. If it's a cloudy day.

Caged starlings are unable to discern direction, which proves that birds flying during the day rely on the sun to find direction. It has also been found that birds flying at night use the stars in the sky to identify their bearings.

2. Magnetic orientation.

Experiments with pigeons, strapped batteries and coils to pigeons to create artificial magnetic fields, and found that artificial magnetic fields interfere with the ability of pigeons to return home, which proves that birds can sense the earth's magnetic field and use the magnetic field to find their way.

3. Visual orientation.

Terrain and landscapes such as mountains, coasts, rivers, forests and deserts are marked by habitat and migration pathways, and traditional migration routes are constantly learned by the old birds. For example, boobies are artificially transported more than 300 kilometers away and released. These birds first have to work hard to find the Atlantic Ocean that they are familiar with.

coastline, and then quickly fly back to its original habitat. While terrestrial features may not be important for nocturnal migratory birds, there are some birds that can locate and adjust the direction of flight based on land landmarks.

4. Auditory orientation.

There are also those who believe that birds are navigated by hearing, which is the proposed infrasound.

Theoretically, they believe that birds are highly sensitive to sounds and can discern direction by some sounds around them.

5. Olfactory orientation.

Attention has been paid to the olfactory organs of the pigeons, which are believed to be volatile in each area.

An olfactory diagram in which odorous substances are constituted in a specific way. They hypothesized that the pigeons would leave a scent in the area that formed an invisible network in the air that could find "markings".

6. Training and memorization.

It is believed that birds have an inherent sense of direction that is determined by genetics. This sense of direction, as the young birds follow the migration of the parent bird, constantly strengthens the memory of the migration route.

How to distinguish the direction of the birds traveling far away has always been a mystery that people have been puzzled about. Like many birds can fly long distances, but what do they rely on to know the direction of flight? People have never been able to give a reasonable explanation.

Seagulls, which are usually born within 10° of the Arctic Circle in summer, run away from home a few weeks after birth, and fly to the Antarctic ice floe area for the winter, which is 10,000 kilometers away from its birthplace. In the summer, they fly back to the place where they were born, and because of this twist and turn, they can travel 40,000 kilometers back and forth.

Some people believe that some birds rely on the earth's magnetic field for directional navigation, such as carrier pigeons; There are also those who believe that birds navigate by the sun and stars. There is also a popular theory that analyzes from a genetic point of view. It is believed that birds are born with their migratory habits and ability to recognize their way.

There is also some theory that the migratory habits of birds were developed in prehistoric times due to difficulties in foraging. At that time, the birds had to make periodic long journeys in search of food. From generation to generation, year after year, through a long evolutionary process, various migratory habits are recorded in their genetic code, and then passed down from generation to generation through ribonucleic acid molecules.

Therefore, those young birds that have been abandoned by their parents can still fly freely for thousands of miles without any migration experience and under the guidance of adult birds. Arrive at their destination to hunt for food.

There are two kinds of storks living in Germany: the western stork flies over France and Spain, then across the Strait of Gibraltar and along the coast of North Africa to Egypt; The storks in the east bypass the end of the Mediterranean Sea to Egypt. People put the eggs of the eastern stork in the nest of the western stork, and after hatching the bird, in order to better identify it, so they put a mark on the body of the bird, and it is very surprising that when the eastern bird grows up, it does not follow the foster mother who raised them to fly along the route they fly, but follows the route of the eastern stork inherent to their ancestors. The results of the experiment showed that the choice of route for the stork was determined by genetic factors, and it was not simply to follow their elders.

There are also people who believe that birds rely on hearing to navigate, which is the theory of infrasound, which they believe that birds are highly sensitive to sounds and can distinguish their direction by some sounds around them.

The sky is high and the birds can fly", what is the directional flight factor of birds? To date, it has not been fully revealed.

This is a mystery that has not yet been fully solved, and there are many conjectures, but these conjectures may only be part of it, and in fact bird positioning may be far more complex than people think. As far as I know, there are several aspects:

1.Geomagnetism, it is said that carrier pigeons rely on the geomagnetic field to locate and find the direction of home. The carrier pigeon transmits the message conditionally, that is, it must be taken to another place to the dispatcher, and then released, and it will find its way home and carry the letter back.

If you want to use your pigeon to pass the message to a place other than your pigeon, this pigeon is not competent.

2.Celestial phenomena, including the sun, the moon, and the stars. Some scientists have done experiments to release migratory birds in a simulated starry sky, and then slowly change to simulate the starry sky, and found that the birds always fly in a certain direction of the sky.

3.Landmarks, this is mainly by the older generation of birds flying with the new generation, and the older generation may recognize some special landmarks on the ground.

Birds use their right eyes to see the Earth's magnetic field and navigate accordingly. The researchers found that if the bird's right eye was covered with an eyepatch, it would not be able to navigate effectively, but it would still be able to navigate perfectly when its left eye was covered by an eye patch.

Birds see magnetic fields with their right eyes and relay information to their left brain, the researchers said. The light and dark shadows created by the magnetogram can be seen by birds using their normal vision. When the bird turns its head, the shadow changes, and the bird uses the pattern of the shadow as a visual compass to determine the direction.

Scientists believe that the molecules on the retina of birds become active when they encounter blue light, and each molecule has an unpaired electron, forming a "free radical pair". The presence of magnetic fields has an effect on the time it takes for these free radicals to return to the inactive state of the molecule. Both visual and magnetic maps have changes in light and shadow, but visual maps generally have sharper lines and edges, while magnetic maps are graded from light to dark.

The researchers found that when this magnetic perception was distorted, the chiaroscuro became meaningless because the birds could not tell what was coming from the visual map and what was getting it from the magnetogram.

Birds rely on the sun to orient themselves during the day; At night, they rely on the moon and stars to find directions. Some birds can even use the Earth's magnetic field and the action of the Earth's rotation to navigate, and there is a "biological compass" similar to a navigation compass instrument in the bird's body.

Birds also have a variety of navigation methods, such as determining the direction according to the changes in the sun, moon and stars, and birds can also judge the natural environment several kilometers ahead through their keen hearing.

In addition, there is a small iron ball hidden in the bird's ear, which acts like a compass to help the bird navigate, so that the bird never deviates from the correct course.

Every autumn, flocks of migratory birds fly south. In the spring of the following year, they flew back to where they had lived.

Amazingly, migratory birds almost have a certain route for their migration, and they always find their "home" that they built back then. Scientists put the white-throated warbler into the planetarium's planetarium, which is filled with a Nordic-like night sky full of stars. The white-throated warbler flew in the man-made starry sky, and soon found the south and flew in the direction of wintering.

When the scientists rotated the "sky" horizontally by 180 degrees, the stars shifted, and the white-throated warbler turned around and flew in the opposite direction.

Scientists swapped the positions of the "sky" several times in a row, and the white-throated warbler always flew in the direction indicated by the constellation without error. And when the "sky" does not have constellations, the white-throated warbler loses the ability to recognize direction. Night-flying migratory birds such as the white-throated warbler can use the stars to determine their position and identify directions, which is a kind of "astronomical navigation".

Birds can rely on geomagnetism, the sun, and stars to determine direction, and they may also rely on the direction of the wind, temperature, and especially the smell of the atmosphere.

The three little secretary birds were confused. Garin said: It's so complicated, huh? We can't learn.

Maureen then said, "We don't need that." We birds are born to discern directions, we generally don't get lost, we always find our way home.

Fei Lin said: No, we don't need anyone to teach us, we just will.

Philin uses his imagination: Maybe we listened to Mom and Dad when we were in the eggs.

This, this, Fei Lin said it.

They couldn't tell, and the little mustang couldn't hear it clearly. At this time, the secretary Father Bird, who was chatting with Daddy Mustang, came over: I'll tell you.

We don't rely on what we look to be able to orient ourselves. We birds have a biological compass similar to a human navigation compass instrument, and we can find our home by the instructions of the biological compass. During the day we rely on the sun to determine our direction; At night, they rely on the moon and stars to find directions.

So, we can still find home on a moonlit and starry night, but when the clouds are thick, we will be overwhelmed. Our ability to discern direction is an instinct that we are born with.

The little mustangs still don't quite understand, but they know it, it's an instinct, so they don't understand. In short, birds don't use their eyes to find their way.