Thank you Laurie for this interesting article. What an amazing finding!
Just shows how humans influence the natural world in ways we never even
dreamt of.
One point made in the article is:
"It makes you think what did pigeons and other birds do before we cluttered
the landscape with all these linear features..... Maybe they were using
rivers and coastlines before."
There is a good example of this among Australian birds with the migration
of Yellow-faced and White-naped Honeyeaters, which definitely seem to
follow natural features such as rivers and coastlines. Here in the NSW Blue
Mountains the dominant linear natural feature, more enormous and imposing
than any road, is the cliffs. And the honeyeaters do tend to follow these
clifflines during their migration, as well as the gullies and creeks. (It
is the gullies which allow a relatively easy passage from the bottom to the
top of the cliffs, effectively funnelling the birds into a narrow front.)
They certainly don't fly in an unwavering north-south direction as might be
expected if they were navigating solely via their inbuilt compass or the
sun, but vary their direction according to the features of the landscape.
But I haven't noticed them following the highway yet! Fascinating stuff.
Carol
At 12:29 PM +1000 6/2/04, knightl wrote:
>http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/02/05/1075853991021.html
>
>Stone the crows, pigeons follow roads
>February 6, 2004
>
>Researchers have cracked the puzzle of how pigeons find their way home:
>they just follow the main roads.
etc...
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