HOMING PIGEONS

                     A suggestion as to how a difficulty might be resolved

I am not an active researcher in this field. You can see something of my interests here.

However, I did have an amateur's interest in the way in which long distance , bird migrational, navigation might be carried out and to this end I became a member of the Royal Institute of Navigation. This organisation has an Animal Navigation Group in which members exchange ideas. It's a good discussion group, and it is run by Air Cdre Pinky Grocott.

In June 2009 an unusually robust email discussion took place between a group of researchers and one Professor Wallraff. Prof Wallraff, it seemed, had taken exception to some details to do with experiments on homing pigeons.

I was intrigued by some aspects of this discussion and I went out and bought Prof. Wallraff's book "Avian Navigation :Pigeon Homing as a Paradigm" ISBN 3-540-22385-1 Publisher : Springer-Verlag 2005.

In Chapter 7, there is an excellent description of the Olfactory Hypothesis which does not avoid discussing the difficulties associated with the idea.

After gazing at the problem for some weeks, I had the idea that if the birds detected a molecule that had a short life, then perhaps the Olfactory idea would work better. The point of a short lived molecule is that it does not live long enough to get blown on the wind and will tend to hang over it's place of origin. So there is then a semi-fixed geographical smell profile.

I have placed a copy of my original letter to Professor Wallraff here and I have placed a short note giving some more explanation here