HR: 0800h
AN: B51B-0368    [Abstracts]
TI: Atmospheric Rawinsonde and Pigeon Release Data Implicate Infrasound as the Long- Range Map Cue in Avian Navigation
AU: * Hagstrum, J T
EM: jhag@usgs.gov
AF: U.S. Geological Survey, 345 Middlefield Road, MS 937, Menlo Park, CA 94025, United States
AB: Pigeons ( Columba livia) and other birds released from distant familiar and unfamiliar sites generally head in the homeward (loft) direction, but often vanish from view or radio contact consistently off the exact homeward bearing. At some sites the deviation can be a significant and stable amount, while at other sites birds can appear to become completely lost and depart in random directions. These deviations or biases can change from hour to hour, day to day, and year to year, but have not, over the last ~50 years of intensive research, been related to any atmospheric factor. They are, however, still considered to reflect significant irregularities in the pigeons' "map" function. Celestial and geomagnetic "compasses" have been shown to orient avian flight, but how pigeons determine their location in order to select the correct homeward bearing remains controversial. At present the debate is primarily between workers advocating an olfactory "map" and those advocating variations in the direction and intensity of the geomagnetic field as map functions. Alternatively, infrasonic cues can travel 1000s of km in the atmosphere with little attenuation, and can be detected in the laboratory by pigeons at frequencies down to 0.05 Hz. Although infrasound has been considered as a navigational tool for homing and migratory birds, little supporting evidence of its use has been found. Infrasonic ray paths in the atmosphere are controlled primarily by temperature and secondarily by wind. Assuming birds use infrasonic cues, atmospheric conditions could cause the perplexing changes (both geographic and temporal) observed in the mean vanishing bearings (MVBs) of pigeons released from experimental sites. To test for correlations between MVBs and tropospheric conditions, release data collected by the late W.T. Keeton between 1968 and 1980 from around the Cornell University lofts in upstate NY are compared to rawinsonde data from stations near Buffalo and Albany. For example, birds released at the Jersey Hill fire tower 132 km W of Ithaca most often departed at random. A singular exception was August 13, 1969; the Cornell birds released at Jersey Hill that day vanished in a tight cluster to the NE and arrived home the same day. Birds released the next day vanished randomly, and no evidence of what changed at Jersey Hill on August 13 has previously been presented. What did change, compared to the other release dates, were the speed and direction of the upper tropospheric winds over western NY. The jet stream winds are commonly from the SW and oppose infrasonic signals coming from the E, presumably near Ithaca, potentially creating an infrasonic "dead zone" at Jersey Hill. On August 13, 1969, the jet stream winds extraordinarily dropped sharply in speed and reversed direction to come from the NE. By the next day the upper tropospheric winds had returned to their normal westerly pattern explaining the Cornell birds' disorientation just one day later. This and several other examples will be presented indicating that infrasonic cues are a likely candidate for the long-range map cue in avian navigation.
DE: 0315 Biosphere/atmosphere interactions (0426, 1610)
DE: 0416 Biogeophysics
DE: 0426 Biosphere/atmosphere interactions (0315)
DE: 0498 General or miscellaneous
DE: 3384 Acoustic-gravity waves
SC: Biogeosciences [B]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting