Familiar route loyalty implies visual pilotage in the homing pigeon

• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0406984101
• Publication Date: 2004-12-01T01:14:05Z
• Authors: Dora Biro; Jessica Meade; Tim Guilford
• Keywords: Homing (biology); Traverse

Wide-ranging animals, such as birds, regularly traverse large areas of the landscape efficiently in course their local movement patterns, which raises fundamental questions about cognitive mechanisms involved. By using precision global-positioning-system loggers, we show that homing pigeons ( Columba livia ) not only come to rely on highly stereotyped yet surprisingly inefficient routes within area but are attracted directly back individually preferred even when released from novel sites off-route. This precise route loyalty demonstrates a reliance familiar landmarks throughout flight, was unexpected under current models avian navigation. We discuss how visual may be encoded waypoints maps.