By Susan Milius
Scientists may have been going in the wrong direction to find bird beaks’ built-in navigation sensors, says a provocative new study.
Pigeons and other birds appear to use the Earth’s magnetic field, along with sights and sounds, to figure out where they’re flying. But the widely accepted identification of one set of magnetically sensitive cells is “totally wrong,” says neuroscientist David Keays of the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna.
He’s talking about work published in 2003 identifying clusters at six places in pigeons’ upper beaks as nerve cells. Those clusters have little crystals of iron compounds that might serve as biological compass needles, the earlier study proposed.