New publication: Predicting performance of naive migrating birds

We recently published a new study on predicting the performance of migratory birds in Communications Biology, which made it even (for a short while) onto the title slide of the journal as “How do birds find their way?”.

In the study we explore the robustness of various compass courses for bird migration. In fact, our study is a bit a tour de force, as we simultaneous pursue the following goals:

• calcutate bird migration trajectories for a variety of different compass courses (sun-, geomagnetic-, star-compass, etc)
• give analytical expressions for compass course performance
• compute the sensitivitiy of these compass courses to navigation errors and show that sensitivities vary stronlgy according to course type, latitudes, and flight direction
• consider the case that cues are transfered between different compass courses
• show that time-compensated sun-compass courses have the remarkable ability to self-correct, that is, they can compensate for displacement errors without the help of a (true) map
• show how all this can be calculated considering the curved shape of Earth by including a spherical geometry factor.

Jamie (James D. McLaren), a scientist at my research group and first author of the study, already wrote a beautiful Behind the paper at natureportfolio, titled Predicting how inexperienced migratory animals find their way.
So I refer to his post for obtaining more information on our paper.