23 September 2011 by Tristan Gooley
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…
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Tags: aircraft, aviation, birds, contrails, find direction, finding direction, migration, New Zealand, northwest, southeast |
13 January 2010 by Tristan Gooley
…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…
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Tags: birds, latitude, longitude, migration, sea, sun |
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.
