How does a lone pigeon get back home? Does it choose the fastest, the easiest or the safest route?
As flying takes a lot of energy, birds generally adapt their flight speed and trajectory to reduce how much they use.
Now researchers at Swansea University have been using high-tech tags to study homing pigeons and to discover if these crucial decisions could be linked to helping them avoid attack by predators.
When the team monitored pigeons as they flew back to their loft at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour in Germany, they observed that the birds did sometimes adopt energy-efficient flight styles such as starting their climbs ahead of hills to reduce their climb angle. But they also saw pigeons using up energy by flying at high speeds.
Baptiste Garde, of the University’s Swansea Lab for Animal Movement (SLAM) led the new research which has just been published by the journal Royal SocietyOpen Science
He said: “This might suggest that pigeons are just trying to get home as fast a possible, but by comparing the variation in their flight speed and altitude to those of an ultralight aircraft following the same path, we found that pigeon altitude and speed was, in fact, very variable.
“Flying this way is neither efficient in terms of time nor energy, but it might have an unexpected advantage. Indeed, if we look at the trajectory of a rabbit on the run, or a snipe flying away, we can see that they make unpredictable sharp turns to confuse their predators.
“That is what we call a protean behaviour. Pigeons might be using the same strategy to increase their chances of avoiding an attack.
“Protean flight has only been described in a handful of birds up until now but we think that it might be a relatively common behaviour, with birds flying in a more unpredictable way when they fly solo.”
Pigeon Patrol Products & Services is the leading manufacturer and distributor of bird deterrent (control) products in Canada. Pigeon Patrol products have solved pest bird problems in industrial, commercial, and residential settings since 2000, by using safe and humane bird deterrents with only bird and animal friendly solutions. At Pigeon Patrol, we manufacture and offer a variety of bird deterrents, ranging from Ultra-flex Bird Spikes with UV protection, Bird Netting, 4-S Bird Gel and the best Ultrasonic and audible sound devices on the market today.
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Contact us at 1- 877– 4– NO-BIRD, (604) 585-9279 or visit our website at www.pigeonpatrol.ca
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All birds should be hatched wild and live and fly free but unfortunately many don’t. Whether they are our pets because they are domestic or because they are rescued from the wild, they can’t free fly safely. We would break your heart with all the stories of pet birds lost. And how they suffer.
The biggest risk to a pet pigeon or dove is getting outside and being killed by a predator before he can get back in to safety. Wild pigeons derive all their security from being part of a flock that stays alert watching out for predators and knows what to do (and has the education and physiology to do) what is needed when under attack. A pigeon alone is extremely vulnerable. A domestic pigeon outside alone is in imminent danger. It is unsafe to take a pet pigeon outside unprotected. They need to be in an aviary or in the house.
Your pet pigeon or dove doesn’t want to get lost but many do, especially when allowed to hang around outside in the backyard or ride along unprotected on their person’s shoulder. And clipped wings do not protect birds outside. Birds are by their very nature aerodynamic and being outside unprotected with clipped wings is no safer. One little startle and, with the air currents outdoors, they are airborne. And in danger. Wild pigeons and doves derive all of their security from their survival of the fittest DNA, their education growing up in the wild and from being a part of a flock. Your pet pigeon, even if hatched wild, is at terrible risk if permitted to free fly. You (and your dogs and your patio cover, etc. etc.) offer no protection to pet birds, only an illusion of safety. We too wish your pet could fly free but the odds of tragedy are very high. It is just too great a risk.
Reprinted from the Palomacy Help Group, written by Ashley Dietrich
We’re discussing free-flying pet pigeons, and why not to do it.
It sounds great, right? These fantastic fliers, out in the fresh air, doing what nature intended? It sounds wonderful, and I wish I could give my birds the whole sky to enjoy. While pigeons and doves DO need exercise and sunlight, these needs can be met with a predator-proof aviary, out-of-cage time indoors, secure leashes, etc. Here are the reasons Palomacy advocates against allowing domestic birds outdoors un-caged/un-tethered:
1. Predators
— Hawks – they’re everywhere. I’ve read a report about a hawk grabbing a parrot off of an owner’s shoulder. Raptors focus tightly on their intended prey, swoop in, and won’t always notice or care if a human is nearby. Two years ago, a small hawk tried to get my dove Cecily as she sat inside the screen of my open window, sunning after a bath – I was sitting less than 3 feet away. My windows are now covered in hardware cloth in addition to the basic window screens, so it is safe to open the glass. I live in the woods, but hawks are city birds too.
— Cats and Dogs. Even with the benefit of wild instincts, countless birds fall victim to outdoor cats and dogs. Cat attacks are the #1 human-related cause of bird mortality. I’ve seen this first-hand too many times as a wildlife rehabber, and I’ll spare you the gory details.
2. Birds can get lost
Birds are more difficult to retrieve than 4-legged pets. It’s easy for something to spook a bird – if they go too high or too far, it can be even harder to get them back. They can cover more distance, quickly – and a bit of wind exacerbates this problem. The tamest of birds could bolt if startled, and not all pigeons have a homing instinct. Adding to the complications, many people do not realize they are pets, so birds are less likely to get help from strangers. The pigeons and doves I have retrieved after they were found outdoors have all been suffering from dehydration or hunger to some degree. They cannot find food and water in the wild.
Pigeon Patrol Products & Services is the leading manufacturer and distributor of bird deterrent (control) products in Canada. Pigeon Patrol products have solved pest bird problems in industrial, commercial, and residential settings since 2000, by using safe and humane bird deterrents with only bird and animal friendly solutions. At Pigeon Patrol, we manufacture and offer a variety of bird deterrents, ranging from Ultra-flex Bird Spikes with UV protection, Bird Netting, 4-S Bird Gel and the best Ultrasonic and audible sound devices on the market today.
Voted Best Canadian wholesaler for Bird Deterrent products ten years in a row.
Contact us at 1- 877– 4– NO-BIRD, (604) 585-9279 or visit our website at www.pigeonpatrol.ca
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When the leader of a flock goes the wrong way, what will the flock do?
With human beings, nobody can be sure. But with homing pigeons, the answer is that they find their way home anyway.
Either the lead pigeon recognizes that it has no clue and falls back into the flock, letting birds that know where they are going take over, or the flock collectively decides that the direction that it is taking just doesn’t feel right, and it doesn’t follow.
Several European scientists report these findings in a stirring report in Biology Letters titled, “Misinformed Leaders Lose Influence Over Pigeon Flocks.”
Isobel Watts, a doctoral student in zoology at Oxford, conducted the study with her advisers, Theresa Burt de Perera and Dora Biro, and with the participation of Mate Nagy, a statistical physicist from Hungary, who is affiliated with several institutions, including Oxford and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Biro, who studies social behavior in primates as well as pigeons, said that the common questions that ran through her work were “about group living and what types of challenges and opportunities it brings.”
She and her colleagues at Oxford have pioneered a method of studying flock behavior that uses very-fine-resolution GPS units, which the birds wear in pigeon-size backpacks.
The devices record a detailed position for each bird a number of times a second. Researchers in Budapest and Oxford developed software to analyze small movements and responses of every bird in a flock.
With this method, the scientists can identify which pigeons are leading the way. They can build a picture of how each bird responds to changes in the flight of other birds.
The consistent leaders were often fast fliers and occupied the first position in the group of flying birds. Other birds followed them.
But what if one day, a leader flew in the wrong direction?
The researchers arranged to feed the leaders misinformation by putting them in lofts with artificial light for a few days. By shifting when the lights went on and off, compared with the actual external schedule of light and dark, the researchers could shift the pigeons’ internal clocks a few hours forward or back.
Pigeons navigate by using the position of the sun and an internal clock, so the change in the clock threw off their sense of direction and they didn’t fly toward home at all.
But the pigeon flock corrected its flight path, and went the right way.
Dr. Biro doesn’t know exactly how they corrected. The followers all had the right information, so they might have collectively said, “this guy’s wrong, let’s not follow him,” Dr. Biro said.
“Or, the leader said, ‘Something’s wrong here,’” and fell back into the flock, “effectively choosing not to lead,” Dr. Biro said, and another pigeon, that knew the time of day, led the way.
Sadly, these kinds of decisions by pigeon flocks offer no reassurance to humans who think political leaders are misinformed or misdirected.
The pigeons don’t communicate directly about where they are flying. The flock changes its flight path because of split-second reactions to position changes by other birds. There’s no decision-making process remotely similar to, say, an election.
But knowledge of how the pigeons work might be useful in creating swarms of small robots for activities like search and rescue. If researchers can reduce the decision-making process of a flock to a few simple rules about who follows whom, and when, those rules might be applied to robot groups.
Then the group of robots might be able to make some of its own decisions, at least about where to go or how to get there.
Pigeon Patrol Products & Services is the leading manufacturer and distributor of bird deterrent (control) products in Canada. Pigeon Patrol products have solved pest bird problems in industrial, commercial, and residential settings since 2000, by using safe and humane bird deterrents with only bird and animal friendly solutions. At Pigeon Patrol, we manufacture and offer a variety of bird deterrents, ranging from Ultra-flex Bird Spikes with UV protection, Bird Netting, 4-S Bird Gel and the best Ultrasonic and audible sound devices on the market today.
Voted Best Canadian wholesaler for Bird Deterrent products ten years in a row.
Contact us at 1- 877– 4– NO-BIRD, (604) 585-9279 or visit our website at www.pigeonpatrol.ca
Pigeon/Pigeon Patrol / Pigeons Roosting / Vancouver Pigeon Control /Bird Spikes / Bird Control / Bird Deterrent / Pigeon Deterrent? Surrey Pigeon Control / Pest /Seagull deterrent / Vancouver Pigeon Blog / Birds Inside Home / Pigeons in the cities / Ice Pigeons/ What to do about pigeons/ sparrows , Damage by Sparrows, How To Keep Raccoons Away, Why Are Raccoons Considered Pests/ De-fence / Pigeon Nesting/ Bird Droppings / Pigeon Dropping/ woodpecker control/ Professional Bird Control Company/ Keep The Birds Away/ Birds/rats/ seagull/pigeon/woodpecker/ dove/sparrow/pidgeon control/pidgeon problem/ pidgeon control/flying rats/ pigeon Problems/ bird netting/bird gel/bird spray/bird nails/ bird guard
Many birds travel in flocks, sometimes migrating over thousands of miles. But how do the birds decide who will lead the way? Researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on November 25 now have some new insight based on studies in homing pigeons. For pigeons, it seems, leadership is largely a question of speed.
“This changes our understanding of how the flocks are structured and why flocks of this species have consistent leadership hierarchies,” says Dora Biro of the University of Oxford.
Previous studies had shown that flock leadership is unrelated to social dominance. Giving followers extra training flights doesn’t promote them to a position of leadership, either. The new findings offer an elegantly simple explanation for the phenomenon of leadership in birds, with important implications for how spatial knowledge is generated and retained in navigating flocks.
While many birds travel in flocks, homing pigeons are domestic and more easily studied than most. “We can control the composition of the flocks and the starting points for their homeward journeys,” says Benjamin Pettit, the first author of the new study. “We also have a good understanding of their individual spatial cognition, in particular how their homing routes develop over repeated flights in the same area.”
Recent developments in sensor technology also make it possible to explore with exquisite precision how pigeon flocks are coordinated. The latest GPS loggers allow the researchers to track not only the birds’ overall routes, but also the sub-second time delays with which they react to each other while flying as a flock.
In the new study, the researchers compared pigeons’ relative influence over flock direction to their solo flight characteristics. Their studies showed that a pigeon’s degree of leadership could be predicted by its speed in earlier flights.
In solo flights, leaders were no better than followers in forging a straight path. In other words, they didn’t excel in navigation ability, at least not at first. When the researchers tested the birds individually after a series of flock flights, however, they found that leaders had learned straighter homing routes than followers.
“Some birds are naturally faster and consistently get to the front, where they end up doing more of the navigation, which means on future flights they know the way better,” Biro says. “You can compare this to a ‘passenger-driver’-like effect: drivers in a car have to pay attention while passengers are often unable to recall the route they were driven along, especially if they remained passive in the navigation process.”
While it’s often tempting to take an anthropocentric view of leadership, the findings come as a reminder that leadership can arise as an unavoidable consequence of individual differences within a population. A very simple, self-organizing mechanism–such as that based on variation in speed–is sufficient for leadership to arise. In addition, the new findings offer a mechanism through which leaders can improve in their roles over time, making increasingly better decisions that others can follow.
“Our findings broaden the range of species and situations in which we would expect to see leadership and explain how leadership and competence can naturally come to correlate,” Pettit says.
Pigeon Patrol Products & Services is the leading manufacturer and distributor of bird deterrent (control) products in Canada. Pigeon Patrol products have solved pest bird problems in industrial, commercial, and residential settings since 2000, by using safe and humane bird deterrents with only bird and animal friendly solutions. At Pigeon Patrol, we manufacture and offer a variety of bird deterrents, ranging from Ultra-flex Bird Spikes with UV protection, Bird Netting, 4-S Bird Gel and the best Ultrasonic and audible sound devices on the market today.
Voted Best Canadian wholesaler for Bird Deterrent products ten years in a row.
Contact us at 1- 877– 4– NO-BIRD, (604) 585-9279 or visit our website at www.pigeonpatrol.ca
Pigeon/Pigeon Patrol / Pigeons Roosting / Vancouver Pigeon Control /Bird Spikes / Bird Control / Bird Deterrent / Pigeon Deterrent? Surrey Pigeon Control / Pest /Seagull deterrent / Vancouver Pigeon Blog / Birds Inside Home / Pigeons in the cities / Ice Pigeons/ What to do about pigeons/ sparrows , Damage by Sparrows, How To Keep Raccoons Away, Why Are Raccoons Considered Pests/ De-fence / Pigeon Nesting/ Bird Droppings / Pigeon Dropping/ woodpecker control/ Professional Bird Control Company/ Keep The Birds Away/ Birds/rats/ seagull/pigeon/woodpecker/ dove/sparrow/pidgeon control/pidgeon problem/ pidgeon control/flying rats/ pigeon Problems/ bird netting/bird gel/bird spray/bird nails/ bird guard
What would you call a flock of flamingos, a swarm of swallows, or a group of eagles? Different birds have different collective nouns to describe large groups, such as a raft, a band, a host, a chime, and even a kettle. While many of these terms are obsolete, seldom used, or just plain silly, they are still unique and distinctive names that are familiar to birders. Many flock names are descriptive not only of the group of birds but also of their behavior or personalities. Birds flock together mostly as a safety mechanism, for example. Birders who understand these esoteric words and associated behaviors and can apply them to the appropriate birds will enjoy birding even more.
What Is a Flock?
Not every group of birds is automatically a flock. The two characteristics that generally constitute a flock are:
6 Sounds Birds Make and What They Mean
Numbers: Counting birds can give you a hint. Just two or three birds are not usually a flock. But there is no set minimum number of birds that are needed to call a group a flock. In general, larger groups are always considered flocks, while smaller groups may be flocks if the birds are not often seen in groups. For example, gregarious birds such as gulls, ducks, and starlings are often seen in very large groups, so just a half dozen of these birds together would not usually be called a flock. Less social birds, however, such as hummingbirds or grosbeaks, would be considered a flock if there were only a few birds since they are much less likely to gather in larger groups.
Species: Any large group of birds, no matter how many different species make up the group, can be called a flock if only a general flock term is used. The more unique, specialized terms, however, are only used for single-species flocks. The exception is when all the species that make up the flock are still in the same related family. A flock of sparrows, for example, can still be called a knot, flutter, host, quarrel, or crew even if several sparrow species are part of the group. A group of wading birds, however, is just a flock if there are herons, godwits, egrets, flamingos, storks, and plovers all mixed in the crowd, as all these birds have different collective nouns for their species.
Fun Fact
A flock of crows is known as a murder, a name given to these smart, social creatures because they were once thought of as omens of death, scavenging for food where there were dead bodies.
Why Do Birds Fly Together?
Birds form clusters of organized groups, called flight flocks, for a reason. Experts believe flocks increase the odds of survival and safety. Flocking can increase the possibility of finding food and protecting each other from trouble and predators. Flock of birds that fly in V formations may be doing so to conserve energy. Birds drafting off of each other’s flapping wings can make the journey easier and less exhausting.
Certain birds, such as starlings, for example, form acrobatic flocks that can turn on a dime to create shapes and undulating feats in the air. This flock behavior is meant to quickly deter their predator, the fast and furious falcon. Other birds, such as dunlins, may synchronize a subtle tilt to their bodies while in a flight flock as a way to camouflage their plumage to confuse predators.
Special Names for Flocks of Birds
When a flock consists of just one type of bird or closely related species of birds, specialized terms are often used to describe the group. The most colorful and creative flock names include:
Birds of Prey (hawks, falcons): cast, cauldron, kettle
Bobolinks: chain
Budgerigars: chatter
Buzzards: wake
Cardinals: college, conclave, radiance, Vatican
Catbirds: mewing
Chickadees: banditry
Chickens: peep
Cormorants: flight, gulp, sunning, swim
Coots: cover
Cowbirds: corral, herd
Cranes: herd, dance
Creepers: spiral
Crossbills: crookedness, warp
Crows: murder, congress, horde, muster, cauldron
Doves: bevy, cote, flight, dule
Ducks: raft, team, paddling, badling
Eagles: convocation, congregation, aerie
Emus: mob
Finches: charm, trembling
Flamingos: flamboyance, stand
Frigatebirds: fleet, flotilla
Game Birds (quail, grouse, ptarmigan): covey, pack, bevy
Pigeon Patrol Products & Services is the leading manufacturer and distributor of bird deterrent (control) products in Canada. Pigeon Patrol products have solved pest bird problems in industrial, commercial, and residential settings since 2000, by using safe and humane bird deterrents with only bird and animal friendly solutions. At Pigeon Patrol, we manufacture and offer a variety of bird deterrents, ranging from Ultra-flex Bird Spikes with UV protection, Bird Netting, 4-S Bird Gel and the best Ultrasonic and audible sound devices on the market today.
Voted Best Canadian wholesaler for Bird Deterrent products ten years in a row.
Contact us at 1- 877– 4– NO-BIRD, (604) 585-9279 or visit our website at www.pigeonpatrol.ca
Pigeon/Pigeon Patrol / Pigeons Roosting / Vancouver Pigeon Control /Bird Spikes / Bird Control / Bird Deterrent / Pigeon Deterrent? Surrey Pigeon Control / Pest /Seagull deterrent / Vancouver Pigeon Blog / Birds Inside Home / Pigeons in the cities / Ice Pigeons/ What to do about pigeons/ sparrows , Damage by Sparrows, How To Keep Raccoons Away, Why Are Raccoons Considered Pests/ De-fence / Pigeon Nesting/ Bird Droppings / Pigeon Dropping/ woodpecker control/ Professional Bird Control Company/ Keep The Birds Away/ Birds/rats/ seagull/pigeon/woodpecker/ dove/sparrow/pidgeon control/pidgeon problem/ pidgeon control/flying rats/ pigeon Problems/ bird netting/bird gel/bird spray/bird nails/ bird guard
