Star Navigation of Nocturnal Migrating Birds (original) (raw)
The 1958 Planetarium Experiments
- E. G. Franz Sauer and
- Eleonore M. Sauer
- University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin
Excerpt
In search of paths and goals of migrating birds, the method of birdbanding has yielded, among other results, one important fact: Every year many birds take their bearings along particular routes across hundreds and thousands of miles toward their different goals, which are typical for each species as well as for various populations of a single species. Furthermore, birds, which have been drifted or purposively displaced, are able to find their way back to their original home, flyway, or destination.
In analogy to the human praxis of navigation, these abilities have been called animal navigation before the mechanisms which underlie this kind of orientation were even partially known.
By means of his keen ideas, the late Gustav Kramer, to whom this paper is dedicated, initiated the experimental approach to the migration orientation of birds and discovered that the sun-azimuth-orientation and the “internal clock” are basic mechanisms for the diurnal orientation...