Home and away: Pigeons can find their way home, even years later

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2021-11-17 11:01

International

Homing pigeons retain memories of homing paths for years after learning them, according to international researchers. The team trained pigeons to home from a site 10km from their loft and did not release them again until three or four years later, when they found the birds could still home more efficiently from that site than naive pigeons who had no experience of the area. The team says they knew pigeons could remember landmarks for days, but were surprised to find the pigeons could retain long-term memory, particularly as the route they used had changed so much over the years. The results provide rare insights into the very-long-term retention of spatial memories for animal navigation, the team says.

Media release

From: The Royal Society

Home and away - Pigeons retain partial memories of homing paths years after learning them individually, collectively or culturally

In 2016 we had trained pigeons to home from a site ca. 10km from their loft; they had not been released from there since, but after 3 or 4 years they still could home more efficiently from this site (and this site only) than naïve pigeons with no previous experience of this site. We knew pigeons could memorize a route of landmarks for days, but here after 3 to 4 years the route they used was on average markedly different than it used to be. Our study provides rare insights into the very-long-term retention of spatial memories for animal navigation

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Research The Royal Society, Web page The URL will go live after the embargo ends.

Journal/
conference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: University of Oxford, UK

Funder: Financial support was provided by the Templeton World Charity Foundation’s ‘Diverse Intelligences’ scheme (grant no. TWCF0316 to D.B.).

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