How Pigeons Find Home: Navigational Map Implanted in Bird Brains

No matter where homing pigeons are released, they find their way home. Now, scientists may have received a bit of insight when it comes to understanding exactly how these birds manage to navigate. They've discovered that pigeons have a spatial map and thus possess cognitive abilities, recognizing where they are in relation to their loft.

In order to examine a pigeon's ability to find its way home, the researchers fitted homing pigeons with miniature GPS loggers in order to monitor their flight paths. They then trained these pigeons not to obtain food in the home loft. Instead, they fed the pigeons in a second loft several miles away so that he birds would have to fly back and forth in order to eat.

After training these pigeons, the scientists then placed the birds in a new, third location. Natural obstacles obscured visual contact between the release site and the two lofts. While one group of pigeons was allowed to eat before flying home, the other group was kept hungry before it was released.

"With this arrangement, we wanted to find out whether the hungry pigeons fly first to the home loft and from there to the foot loft or whether they are able to fly directly to the food loft," said Nicole Blaser of the University of Zurich in a news release. In other words, the researchers could test whether a pigeon could apply its navigational abilities to find food first.

In the end, the fed pigeons flew directly to the home loft. The hungry pigeons, in contrast, behaved quite differently. They flew around topographic obstacles and then immediately adjusted to set off on course to the food loft. Based on the findings, it's easy to conclude that the pigeons could determine their location and their direction of flight relative to the target and could even choose between several targets. In other words, the birds have a type of cognitive navigational map in their heads.

The findings are published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.