Correct and false olfactory orientation of homing pigeons as depending on geographical relationships between release site and home site

Abstract

Pigeons from two German home sites were released at a site near Mantua in northern Italy. The home sites, Andechs and Wurzburg, are 303 and 508 km north of the release site, respectively. Not only the initial bearings but still more the distributions of recoveries after a longer flight distance (median 65 km) were very different in pigeons from these two lofts. While the majority of the Wurzburg birds were found north of the release site, almost all birds from Andechs were found south of it (Fig. 1). Pigeons from both lofts, if made anosmic by sectioning the olfactory nerves, showed no average tendency towards change of latitude. These findings strongly suggest that both correct and false positional information were deduced by the birds from olfactory inputs. A coherent (though very hypothetical) interpretation of these and earlier results is based on regularly varying proportions of chemical tract compounds in the atmospheric boundary layer over the Alps and adjacent regions (Fig. 4).