Abstract
In an attempt to determine which external conditions surrounding the release site influence the pigeons’ initial orientation, 32 explanatory variables including meterorological, topographical, and geophysical features were assigned to more than 2000 vanishing bearings and vanishing times recorded in 153 releases in Germany. By using multiple linear regression procedures it could be shown that the pigeons’ initial bearings are best predictable by directional relationships to topographical cues (railway station, settlement, transmission line, electric transformer) and to the gradient direction of the slope downhill. The vanishing intervals increase with the degree of cloud cover and the distance of the release site from home. No hypothesis involving a geophysical map could be corroborated.
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© 1982 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Dornfeldt, K. (1982). Dependence of the Homing Pigeons’ Initial Orientation on Topographical and Meteorological Variables: A Multivariate Study. In: Papi, F., Wallraff, H.G. (eds) Avian Navigation. Proceedings in Life Sciences. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-68616-0_25
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-68616-0_25
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