Garden Centre

Tuesday, November 6, 2007

What do you want for Christmas?

This is what I want. Not just the dovecot but the birds to go with it. I’d love to have doves but they are (a) unbelievably expensive and (b) not terribly hardy. So I’d be willing to settle for a pair of homing pigeons.

Interestingly, scientists have finally solved the mystery of how pigeons, dropped off hundreds of miles from home, find their way back to their lofts. According to a study, the birds use the strength of the Earth's magnetic field to work out where they are relative to home. "We are now confident that pigeons do use the intensity of the Earth's magnetic field to determine position during homing," said Todd Dennis of the University of Auckland, who led the research. In his experiment, Dr Dennis released homing pigeons in an area of New Zealand where the Earth's magnetic field is naturally distorted, called the Auckland Junction Magnetic Anomaly. His idea was that, if the intensity of the magnetic field influenced the birds' ability to position themselves, they would be confused by the anomaly when released. Once out, he found that the birds flew up to four kilometres in the wrong direction, parallel or at right angles to variations in strength of the local magnetic field, before redirecting themselves towards their loft.

The real reason for wanting pigeons in the garden is that they attract any number of other birds – and I’d like more of our feathered friends to visit us. We had a woodpecker last year and have seen a thrush already this November, so anything that encourages this progress would be great!

Labels: birds, christmas gifts

The All Seasons Gardener at 12:09 AM

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