my little red birds are using a mental map
Two Sundays ago, my wife and I braved the subarctic temperatures of Central Florida to meet some friends for a walk around Orlando Wetlands off State Road 50 in the town of Christmas. Our primary motivation was to introduce a zoo colleague and his family, who had recently moved here from South Africa,Gucci shoes, to some unusual Florida birds. We chose the site because it was a central location for all of the participants and because it had some good birds,Gucci shoes. Most notably, a couple of male Vermilion Flycatchers had shown up for the last two years.This perky little bird is native to the Southwest but occasionally shows up in Florida in winter. What really makes it notable is its color an electric scarlet that burns like a Christmas light. They use convenient perches as a base from which to sortie out every few minutes to catch bugs on the wingLast year, my friend Tony, the director of the Jacksonville Zoo, and I had journeyed to Orlando Wetlands to see these little guys for the first time in Florida. We found them, just as described by previous viewers, flycatching in a little grove of leafless trees.This year, I hiked back to this same set of trees, and the flycatchers were there. This raised the question how does a half ounce, six-inch, bird find its way back to the same exact set of trees year after year? ?Scientists have solved some of the biggest puzzles of avian navigation.Overall, we think birds navigate using a variety to cues including visual landmarks, the sun, magnetic fields and even odor. All of these methods require adjustments on the fly, so to speak, so birds are not simply programmed to fly from point A to B. They need to make course corrections based on wind conditions, changes in migratory stops, time of day, etc.Just like with pilots, visual cues are probably the most important input for birds on a daily basis and for parts of the migration. We believe they form mental maps just like we do.And there are some researchers who believe that homing pigeons in particular, create an olfactory map from the distribution of environmental odors in the atmosphere to find their way home but this theory is unproven.(Page 2 of 2)A human story I heard relating to this was from a zoo colleague who rode out Hurricane Andrea at Zoo Miami. After a few days, he thought things had calmed down enough that he could drive home . It took him all day to find the remains of a home that he had lived in for five years.Even though the streets remained, the street signs and houses were gone. Turned out, that like most of us, my friend had used visual cues like the blue house on the corner or the big oak tree to navigate his home neighborhood. Without these cues,louis vuitton Outlet, he was lost.Until he built a new mental map,http://www.guccioutlet-brands.com/, he had to navigate by counting side streets every time he left the freeway,guccioutlet-1store.com.So birds need back up systems for their visual maps. And two constant environmental factors that anchor these back up systems are the magnetic fields of the earth and the position of the sun.That ability uses special bird photo pigments that measure the sun and magnetites, tiny magnetic minerals, in the birds brains. So presumably,louis vuitton Outlet, my little red birds are using a mental map, good memories of their time in Orlando and a full instrument panel that measures waves from the sun and the earths magnetic field, to find their way. My hats off to them even with the GPS in my cell phone, I can have trouble finding my way,Gucci Bags. Page
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