HOMING PIGEONS

                     A suggestion as to how a difficulty might be resolved

Everybody who has an interest, however slight, in the ability of pigeons to return to a home loft after having been taken considerable distance from it, knows that there is no common understanding of the mechanism.

About thirty years ago, indeed, the whole subject appeared to have ground to a halt.

Then, an Italian, Professor Papi, performed some experiments in which the homing pigeons were deprived of their ability to smell. Basically, Papi's team cut the nerves to the pigeons nose. What he found was that his pigeons ceased to be able to home. So, he said, in some way or another smell was involved in homing.

These experiments certainly put a big head of steam into the train of research and got the subject moving again. Unfortunately, looking from the outside, it seems as though it has polarised the discussion to such an extent that research has again become paralysed.

On the one hand you have the proponents of the "Olfactory Hypothesis" saying "You can't just ignore these experiments", and on the other side you have the people who say, "the winds will blow any scents away by the time the birds want to home; either the scents will be diluted or the wind will change direction and blow the scents into a different geographical configuration or etc etc (add your own argument).

Certainly, on the face of things, you can't easily reconcile the biological experiments with the physical difficulties.

However, I have an idea which makes the Olfactory Hypothesis more defensible.

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