Depriving homing pigeons of olfactory information by spraying an 18% zinc sulphate solution onto their olfactory ephithelium results in anosmia that persists for at least 5 days (tested using the ‘orienting response’). To study whether anosmic zinc-sulphate-treated pigeons (ZnSO4-pigeons) were able to compensate for their loss of olfactory information by using familiar landmarks, we made releas...

BACKGROUND: It is commonly acknowledged that the most safe and method of choice anesthesia in birds is inhalation anesthesia but in some clinical situations, such as tracheal resection, injectable anesthetic agents are the only choice of surgeons regardless of whether or not an anesthesia machine is available. OBJECTIVES: This study aimed to compare the quality of anesthesia and recovery time o...

The way in which homing pigeons find their home lofts is still obscure despite a long history of investigation. Since the work of Kramer & St Paul (1950a, 1952) and of Matthews (1951, 1953), it has been widely believed that some homing pigeons possess the ability to navigate. This belief is now based on the results obtained by many workers (see Schmidt-Koenig, 1965, for a critical review), whic...

A large body of evidence has shown that anosmic pigeons are impaired in their navigation. However, the role of odours in navigation is still subject to debate. While according to the olfactory navigation hypothesis homing pigeons possess a navigational map based on the distribution of environmental odours, the olfactory activation hypothesis proposes that odour perception is only needed to acti...

The mechanisms of pigeon homing are still not understood, in particular how they determine their position at unfamiliar locations. The "gravity vector" theory holds that pigeons memorize the gravity vector at their home loft and deduct home direction and distance from the angular difference between memorized and actual gravity vector. However, the gravity vector is tilted by different densities...

Considerable efforts have been made to investigate how homing pigeons (Columba livia f. domestica) are able to return to their loft from distant, unfamiliar sites while the mechanisms underlying navigation in familiar territory have received less attention. With the recent advent of global positioning system (GPS) data loggers small enough to be carried by pigeons, the role of visual environmen...

The authors presented people (Experiment 1) and pigeons (Experiments 2 and 3) with a large number of 1-way traveling salesperson problems that consisted of 3, 4, and 5 identical stimuli (nodes) on a computer monitor. The sequence of nodes that each traveler selected was recorded, and the distance of the route was subsequently determined. The routes the pigeons and people selected were reliably ...

Anatomical evidence and conditioning experiments have suggested that magnetoreceptors innervated by the ophthalmic branch of the trigeminal nerve are located in the upper beak of homing pigeons. Following these findings it has been proposed that the trigeminally-mediated magnetorececeptors are able to detect magnetic field intensity, which might be useful for a position finding mechanism for pi...

Photographs, especially of humans, are widely used as stimuli in behavioural research with pigeons. Despite their abundant use, it is not clear to what extent pigeons perceive photographs as representing three-dimensional objects. To address this question, we trained 16 pigeons to identify individual, real-life humans. This discrimination depended primarily on visual cues from the heads of the ...

background: pigeons ( columba livia ) have been kept as pet and reared for food in several countries including iran. ectoparasites are regarded as the basic causes of retardation in growth, lowered vitality and poor conditions of the birds. pseudolynchia canariensis a hippoboscidae fly is one of the important ectoparasites of pigeons and is respon­sible for the transmission of pathogens to bird...