Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Airborne pigeons obey the pecking order

I have always wondered how pigeons and some other birds fly in a certain order, they line up so perfectly it is just hard to imagine. You will see the birds at the front of a flock leading the navigation and all the group follows.

The article from Nature News published on 7 April 2010 reported that although pigeons have an almost 340ยบ field of view, the researchers found that the birds at the front of a flock tended to make the navigational decisions. Moreover, birds responded more readily to a leader's movements if the leader was on their left side. When researchers used Global Positioning System (GPS) devices was able to collect data at a rate of five times per second.These researchers strapped lightweight GPS devices to individual pigeons and tracked flocks of up to 10 birds during free flights lasting around 12 minutes and 15-kilometer homing flights. In total, the GPS logged 32 hours of data and captured 15 group flights. These researchers were unable to pinpoint individuals' exact positions within a flock, but were able to accurately compare birds' directions of motion. These researchers looked first at the behavior of pairs of birds. For each possible pairing, the team identified a leader — the bird that changed direction first — and a follower, which copied the leader's motion. According to these researchers followers reacted very quickly, within a fraction of a second.

The animal behavior is very interesting, it is amazing how they communicate and come up with this unique presentation. I do not have enough knowledge when it comes to animal behavior, but I think it is very interesting field of study.

Posted by Anna Moreno

3 comments:

  1. I knew for quite some time now that many species of birds follow a pecking order, but I did not know that it can go airborne. I would like to know more about this type of relationship. What if one were to disrupt this order, what would be the consequence? How do they determine this relationship? How can they decide who is a leader or a follower?

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  2. I have always wondered how birds manage to fly in such synchrony. I did not know that some species of birds follow a pecking order. How do the birds choose who stays in front and leads the rest of the birds. I think it is really neat how birds communicate and travel with such order.

    Posted by Amanda Makowski

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  3. I think thye have some type of rank order or some typr of social status like hyenas. I also do not understand how exactly this go, may be our friends with eome experties on animal behavior can help us with this.
    Thanks all of you for comments.

    Posted by Anna Moreno

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