The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

We may never know the exact method that the earliest explorers used to find their way, but there is a friendly finger of suspicion that gets pointed regularly at the birds.

Some of the routes used by the pioneers of the Pacific match the migratory routes of the birds exactly.

The route used by the Maori fleet that sailed from Tahiti to New Zealand sometime in the fourteenth century and settled there is the same as that taken by the Long-tailed Cuckoo each September.

I like to think of these earliest navigators. I imagine them gazing up as flocks of birds head uniformly over the horizon in one direction only to repeat the exercised in the opposite direction half a year later. It does not take great leaps of the imagination to deduce that the birds are not doing this great exercise for fun, QED, there must be something in…

Read More...

On Friday I enjoyed a warming cup of hot chocolate with adventurer and ocean rower extraordinaire, Sarah Outen. We arranged to meet in Brighton and I had hoped to saunter between the boutiques and purveyors of rare tat, before pulling up a chair in a bohemian cafe near the sea. Instead I sprinted twenty yards from the train station, felt the cold heavy rain run down my neck and then ducked into a disappointingly ordinary peddler of hot drinks.

Fortunately I got a chance to escape all that by listening to Sarah’s memories of rowing, alone, across the Indian Ocean. She experienced plenty of drama as you might imagine, and this will all out in her book that is being published early next year, but the details that seized me were the ones that many others may have found prosaic.

Sarah described how the birds changed as she…

Read More...

‘Courting bustards’ is not an excellent new profanity, something that would sound good with rasping voice and sent in the general direction of a parking warden putting a ticket on your car, it is actually a reference to the romantic habits of the male great bustard bird.

Researchers from the IE University School of Biology in Santa Cruz, Spain, have found that the male bustards align themselves with the sun when trying to attract a female. Their white feathers, the bustard’s equivalent of an Armani suit/Ferrari/pair of Reeboks – delete as applicable, show up better when aligned to catch the sun’s rays. Dr Tommaso Pizzari, an ornithologist from Oxford University, observed that although it made the birds more vulnerable to predators, it certainly made them more visible to females. ‘That’s why we think these puzzling traits evolved and are specific to males.’

Although the bustards have been found to do…

Read More...

My book is on the printing presses – this is very exciting and an excuse for a quick plug in my blog!

In the book I emphasise the importance of using our senses in natural navigation. I cover examples from the sound of birdsong to the smell of trampled fruit in London.

I stumbled across a kindred spirit on the Internet this morning in Sachin Somanna, the author of this article about Gayathri Tiffin Room. It certainly smells from here like one of the joys of the Indian city of Mysore:

“We do not need any directions to reach Gayathri Tiffin Room (or GTR as it is popularly known) because once we close in on Chamundipuram circle, the irresistible aroma of a Mysore Masala Dosa works like a natural navigator to this vegetarian restaurant that is located just a few meters from the circle.  Although the restaurant looks rather…

Read More...

…with a little help from the sun.

An interesting article on the BBC website today about the seasonal habits of Puffins.

The most interesting thing other than learning more about the puffins’ whereabouts was the method they used for understanding where the birds were at any one time. Using ‘geolocator tags’ that logged the time of sunrise, sunset the research team were able to deduce their location.

‘The loggers work by measuring light levels, recording when dawn and dusk occurs each day.

With this data, researchers can calculate day length, when midday occurs, and the daily longitudinal and latitudinal co-ordinates for the individual bird.’

The tags also detected when the birds’ feet were wet, the hope being that this would give information about when the birds were airborne, but the puffins foxed the researchers here: they like to tuck their feet up into their plumage when asleep. Their feet…

Read More...

A robin’s trademark red breast has always struck me as one of nature’s less enthusiastic attempts at camouflage. We went for a family walk in the woods yesterday and this particular robin was very friendly. Even so, when I tried to take a picture of him I sometimes lost him from view as he blended with the leaves.

Blue water sailors are aware that birds can be used in finding land, but walkers tend to overlook one of the simplest of navigational clues. The more friendly the birds, the closer you are to civilization. It’s not just birds either, town foxes are becoming positively insolent.

On Sunday morning, when sailing off the south coast, visibility came down to a few hundred metres at times. The sun played some of its usual tricks in the fog and one that I don’t think I’ve seen before. When looking down-sun it created a colourless rainbow-like arch with pure white underneath, it was very like sailing past the Millennium Dome, or whatever it’s called these days. At one point there was one visible when looking towards the sun as well, it felt like sailing between two domes. Surreal.

We were out of sight of land for most of the morning even though it was no more than a couple of miles away for a lot of the time. A small bird (Tit, Warbler?) landed for a brief inspection of some of the ropes, which was comforting and reassured me that we were still within reach of land!

I was enjoying the view down a misty valley this morning when a flock of gulls went overhead. I took a quick photo and had low expectations of its quality. As you can see it is not going to win any awards, but the faint shape of an upside down Big Dipper did stare back at me when I downloaded the pictures. Signs, signs everywhere, but what do they all mean?