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Secret forays
Natural History, Oct, 2005 by Nick W. Atkinson
Many migrating songbirds are on the wing in the middle of the night, a flight risk for birds not accustomed to the dark. So how does a bird develop its "stellar compass"--long suspected as the main navigational tool of long-distance migrators--if it normally sleeps at night? How, for that matter, does it recognize its home turf, its future breeding sight, in the dark (a key question for the return trip)? The answer is surprisingly simple, though it's taken the latest technological gadgetry to tease it out: young songbirds, like teenagers, just stay up late.
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A team of Russian ornithologists, led by Andrey Mukhin of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Andechs, Germany, attached miniature radio transmitters to each of several dozen juvenile Eurasian reed warblers, Acrocephalus scirgaceus, as the juveniles began to prepare for migration. Young songbirds don't get much time for flight practice; the journey begins, on average, just fifty days after hatching. So the biologists found that the birds cram their "instrument"-flying lessons into twelve days of nocturnal forays around their own patch of Earth. Mukhin and his colleagues conclude that in so doing, the fledglings learn about the subtleties of celestial navigation--not to mention what their home turf looks like from the air--before they depart for good. (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 272: 1535-39, 2005)
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